Marty Supreme (2025 | USA | 150 minutes | Josh Safdie)
From an explosive introduction — complete with a vibrant Alphaville-scored health class cutaway that recalls Amy Heckerling’s 1990s romantic comedy classic Look Who’s Talking Too — resolving into a whimsical cutaway, director Josh Safdie alerts us to fasten our seatbelts for the wild ride of his first solo directorial feature. Like Uncut Gems, his white-knuckled descent into madness co-helmed by his brother Benny, Marty Supreme is a furious all-gas, no-brakes account of desperate ambition. Co-written by Ronald Bronstein and with a prismatic and inquisitive score by Daniel Lopatin (who records under the Oneohtrix Point Never moniker), it shares a great deal of cinematic DNA with prior Safdie Brothers projects. But unlike that stomach-clenching masterpiece of mounting dread, this one, ignited by a rocket ship of performance by a never-better Timothée Chalamet and brilliantly textured to allow audiences to occasionally catch their breaths, is by design considerably warmer and leagues more fun.
When we first encounter Martin Mauser, it’s 1952. He’s in his uncle’s store, selling shoes with the constant patter of someone who could sell a pair to a double amputee and with the dexterity to navigate a spontaneous storeroom hookup with his oldest friend/fuckbuddy while nobody’s looking. In between, he’s offered a promotion, but managing a downtown family footwear concern is not at all the title he’s chasing. No, our scheming hero wants to rule the world. The world being the emerging global sporting phenomenon of competitive table tennis.
There’s a ridiculous frivolity to this scrawny twenty-three-year-old kid, mousy mustache less filled in than the monobrow atop his pock-marked, acne-scarred, bespectacled face, setting his sights on the championship of any global sport. But early on, Safdie reveals the crazy thing: his ambitions aren’t entirely outsized: he’s among the best there is at what he does, if only he could scrape together enough money to make it to the big show. Luckily, his talents aren’t limited to hitting a tiny white ball back and forth. He’s also a world-class schemer among a world of fellow scammers, always looking for an advantage to stay a half step ahead of his ambitions.
There’s no question that Marty’s a dirtbag who will lie and steal and scam in service of his unflinching confidence in his ultimate purpose on this earth. From his short-term work in the shoe business to a coercive side-hustle with a rich failson friend to get into merchandising all the way to demanding a massive upgrade in his tournament accommodations, his is a Goldbergian system of chutzpah of the most epic proportions. Even when he’s cracking the most offensive jokes I’ve seen on film, he backs them up with tiny acts of sentimentality or feats of skill. The brilliance of the film (and of Chalamet’s magnetic performance) is that even if we’re not entirely comfortable being on his side, it’s so relentlessly captivating that we can’t help but be locked in to see where it goes next.
Where it Goes is a globe-trotting saga. First, to the world championships in London, where everything’s coming up Mauser until a loophole in the postwar travel ban on Japan finds an unexpected rival (Koto Kawaguchi as Endo) standing, silent but deadly, in his way of his easy path to glory. That trip will introduce us both to Safdie’s facility with making a genuinely exciting sports movie and will foreground that there are forces in this world more formidable than Marty’s ambitions. On the sporting side, we get both brilliantly staged table tennis showdowns as well as a highly amusing round-the-world series of novelty acts. Amid Holocaust jokes, Safdie also makes room for an unforgettably unsettling yet touching flashback of survival, a trained seal, and a sentimental desecration of one of the surviving wonders of the ancient world. On the other side, we meet Milton Rockwell, a vampiric industrialist played with stunning accuracy by real-life shark Kevin O’Leary. A fellow New Yorker, having made his fortune in ink and lost a son to the war, he initially seems like the answer to all of our hero’s ambitions, but the egos are too big for anything so simple.
There’s also the matter of their acquaintance being made amid Marty’s questionable courtship of Ms. Rockwell, a one-time film star played with a perfect air of confidence and faded glory by Gwyneth Paltrow. She, having been wildly successful in youth, might just be the character who’s best positioned to understand the depths of his ambitions and the ferocity with which he pursues them. Decades his senior and having grown accustomed to the bored trappings of wealth, she’s also the most readily charmed by his flirtations.
Stopped short of his goal early, we’re cast back to square one with Marty to follow as he hustles his way to the next shot. In short order, we see him learn that his backroom fuckbuddy is pregnant, face arrest at the hands of a family member, navigate a madcap flight through the streets, back alleys, and dumpsters of New York, into a shady flophouse, where in the span of thirty seconds he learns he’s been fined, booted from the next tournament, and crashes nude in a bathtub through the floor onto a menacing mobster’s beloved mutt. In any other movie, this cataclysmic series of offenses would be a finale. Here, it’s only the beginning of a breathless quest to catch a flight to Japan.
The picaresque will find Marty and his cabbie buddy (Tyler “the Creator” Okonma, hilarious) playing the rubes of New Jersey for fools before overplaying their own hands. Through a brilliantly layered performance from Odessa A’zion, we see what his old friend Rachel of backroom shoe store fame is all about as she matches him stroke for scamming stroke. Chalamet is obviously incandescent and Paltrow’s born to play his foil, but the casting throughout (by Jennifer Venditti) approaches legendary status, posing a legitimate challenge to what I’d assumed was a certain win in the Academy’s newest category for Cassandra Kulukundis and One Battle After Another. Fran Drescher is terrific as Marty’s nagging mom, Emory Cohen is made to suffer indignities as Rachel’s awful slug of a husband, Fred Hechinger gets a Method-skewering cameo as a fellow actor, Isaac Mizrahi brings down the house as a dishy publicist. Chief among them, though, is Abel Ferrara emerging as a dog lover who’s not to be fucked with. It’s a menagerie that includes little guys and power players, none with any patience for being scammed or interest in accommodating some twerp’s dreams. One after another, blinded by his unshakeable confidence, Marty runs face first into all of them, some to more devastating effects than the others.
As the movie becomes a litany of failures, subjugations, and degradations, Marty barely has time to catch his breath to recognize that he’s on a path to an entirely different kind of redemption arc. He’ll bend to humiliation after humiliation for one last shot to prove a point, and it’s filmed so dynamically that I never stopped smiling no matter how awfully Marty behaved or how embarrassingly his comeuppances were served. With a two-and-a-half-hour runtime that never slogs, it’s conclusive proof that everyone involved has the juice, is absolutely electric from start to finish, and just might even have you levitating out of your seats (insert your own Ringer-coded filmbro appreciation, it all applies here). There’s an earnest magnetism to dreaming big, and in less sure hands, the series of cataclysms could be an intolerably stressful nightmare to witness. But from performance to pacing to cinematography to score, the film propels us on a joyfully chaotic race to a surprisingly moving conclusion that was both unexpected yet telegraphed from the start.
Easily among the year’s best releases, Marty Supreme is neither a Christmas nor Hanukkah movie, yet there is something great about waiting all year for something and then finding out that it actually exceeds the hype. Now if only Santa could find a way to get one of those jackets under my tree, that would be a supreme miracle.
If you’ve somehow managed to miss the Timothée Chalamet promotional tour, you might not know that Marty Supreme arrives in theaters everywhere on Christmas Day.
Image courtesy of A24