The opening credits of Marty Supreme features retro animation of a sperm fertilizing a giant egg; as Alphaville’s “Forever Young” blares over the soundtrack, the giant fertilized egg eventually transforms into a ping pong ball flying across the net of a table. The man hitting the ball, and the carrier of the victorious spermatozoon, is the early-twentysomething Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a self-assured table tennis player who dreams of becoming a world champion. Stuck selling shoes in his Lower East Side neighborhood, still living with his mother in an Orchard Street tenement building surrounded by obnoxious family and neighbors, Marty longs to escape an environment rife with parochial values and limited opportunities. The year is 1952: the devastation of World War II is in the rearview mirror, economic prosperity will soon be on the rise, and America has been swept up in a wave of national optimism. It’s the perfect time for a charming striver like Marty to make his mark with the tools at his disposal: a paddle and a ball, which, as the credits sequence suggests, is the source of life itself.
Directed by Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and co-edited with Ronald Bronstein, Marty Supreme chronicles Marty’s near-constant forward momentum over the course of roughly a year. After traveling to London with stolen funds—only to lose the World Champion title to Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, real-life table tennis champion)—he takes great lengths to acquire the means to travel to Tokyo and compete once again. He performs ping pong tricks as the opening act for the Harlem Globetrotters on their world tour; he hustles players with his cab-driver friend Wally (Tyler Okonma) by exploiting their do-gooder liberalism. In between contending with frequent bouts of homelessness and economic precarity, he juggles relationships with his married friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion), whom he impregnates in the prologue, and over-the-hill actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), who sees an affair with Marty as an escape from her gilded-cage life with her ink-magnate husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary).
Safdie and Bronstein’s script bounces between multiple subplots, each depicting setbacks and self-inflicted humiliations, at unpredictable speeds (much like a…) all bonded by Marty’s raison d’être. Marty Supreme‘s sheer number of events, characters (reportedly more than a hundred), and settings might be overwhelming on paper, but Safdie and Bronstein make their episodic, quasi-Dickensian narrative feel light on its feet. A propulsive fluidity connects, for example, Marty’s repeated dealings with Milton, a potential benefactor who treats the young athlete with dismissive condescension, and an extended digression with a menacing dog owner (Abel Ferrara). Much of that comes down to Safdie and Bronstein’s offbeat writing and editing, but cinematographer Darius Khondji’s roving camera infuses the action with grace even at its most frenzied, and Jack Fisk’s production design, partly inspired by Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, keeps the film grounded in a believable replica of authenticity, whether Marty is running across Orchard Street or traipsing around the Egyptian pyramids. In his first solo feature since a creative split with his brother Benny, Safdie brought along many longtime collaborators, in turn illustrating the necessity of their contributions to their style.
While Marty is a familiar, almost generic type of hustler—a talkative manipulator who knows what people want to hear even before they do, has an answer for any question before it’s even asked, and exhibits a propensity for myth-making (or, to use contemporary parlance, self-branding)—Chalamet uncovers new shades of this archetype by tapping into a vein of reckless self-destruction. The young actor powers Marty Supreme with the sheer strength of swagger, maximally projecting cocksure arrogance and palpable desperation (two trademarks of A-list celebrity, for what it’s worth) until they become almost indistinguishable. But this foundational arrogance lies in permanent tension with a reflexive desire to burn bridges with abandon, a quality that Chalamet renders hilarious and oddly endearing. His ability to subtly shift between different emotional registers while spewing layered lies with mile-a-minute patter clearly makes it his best performance to date, but his willingness to sacrifice charisma at key moments—especially at the altar of Marty’s delusional belief in himself and his own bullshit—indicates heretofore unseen nerve.
Marty’s vainglorious posture is partially dictated by ping pong’s relative stateside obscurity circa the early ’50s. At that time, table tennis was a subculture relegated to backrooms and clubs while being an internationally recognized sport. (It would take until 1988 for it to become an Olympic event.) As much as Marty shoots himself in the foot to achieve a dream most people dismiss as something less than a hobby, he also sees the future where his talent would be appreciated. Daniel Lopatin’s synth-pop score, combined with an anachronistic use of 1980s pop hits, productively clashes with Marty Supreme’s Eisenhower-era setting: both sound and image encapsulate different defining eras of American conservatism where skepticism of The New runs rampant, embodying the spirit of a protagonist stuck in the wrong time.
More than halfway through Marty Supreme, I idly wondered what the film was actually “about.” The thought quickly dissipated from my mind, likely because Safdie’s picaresque feature introduced yet another incident to capture my attention. Truthfully, Marty Supreme is so entertaining, so visually bountiful, that it doesn’t require pronounced thematic coating to lend import; it would probably suffer if Safdie and Bronstein insisted upon such. Political or allegorical readings flit through the subtext without overwhelming primary action. It can be read as a portrait of cultural assimilation, specifically the ways that post-war Jews fought to define their identities outside of trauma or victimhood, often at the risk of further alienation. Marty’s destructive behavior, both on and off the international stage, broadly anticipates how America’s brash entitlement to geopolitical supremacy would eventually run its course. While the core story of a young man forgoing safe, anonymous stability in favor of achieving his “impossible” dream—with all the attendant fame and glory that comes with it—can easily be extended to any artistic pursuit, Marty’s attitude invites comparisons to the Safdies’ persistence and / or Chalamet’s star power.
These various interpretations materialized in the hours after my initial viewing, but what struck me most during Marty Supreme is how it snapped into place as a classical Bildungsroman with roughly five minutes left in its runtime. The Safdies have built careers by chronicling hubristic agents of chaos; their subjects either refuse to learn from the error of their ways or receive an eventual comeuppance. Marty Supreme stuns in comparison because it presents a different path—one of embracing humility as a means of personal growth, without sacrificing a delightfully abrasive style or devolving into preachy sentimentality. Safdie’s film compels because it depicts the excitement and danger of having the innate ability to talk oneself in and out of situations, but it also portrays the limitations of such a modus operandi. Marty Supreme ends with the extension of an olive branch (one that crucially goes unacknowledged) and a tearful reunion. These hallmarks of epic melodrama pack a unique emotional punch precisely because of how much weight Safdie places on living for others instead of exclusively for yourself. As the song says, “It’s so hard to get old without a cause.”
Marty Supreme will receive an exclusive 70mm release in New York and Los Angeles beginning December 19 before opening wide on Christmas Day.