Review: "Marty Supreme" is as great as its hero believes himself to be

One of the year's best - and craziest - films

I’ve been excited for Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme for a while now, ever since seeing that first “Forever Young”-scored trailer back in August; it’s one of those cases where I just fell in love with the entire vibe of the project even from a few scant minutes of well-edited footage. Yet even after months of anticipation, all the critical hype, and my experience with past Safdie joints like Uncut Gems, I was still knocked sideways by just how hard Marty Supreme goes. I mean, the actual usage of Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” just a few minutes into the movie, complements one of the boldest opening credits sequences I have ever seen, and by the time one starts to realize, 90 or so minutes later, that this film about a cocky ping-pong boy is going to have an honest-to-God body count on par with John Carpenter’s original Halloween, that wild opening gambit feels like child’s play (pun intended, for those in the know). I found myself thinking back to a line Matt Damon had when he spoofed Brett Kavanaugh on SNL back in 2018: “I’m gonna start at an 11, [and] take it to a 15 real quick!”

That is the attitude of Marty Supreme, a movie nominally about table tennis that actually spends more time depicting things like armed robbery, car crashes, gas station explosions, runaway dogs, surprisingly graphic violence, and charged moments of sexuality, both in private and in public. The Kavanaugh joke is perhaps an apt comparison, because while this movie’s Marty Mauser (a mostly fictional character loosely inspired by the real table tennis champ Marty Reisman) is not quite as monstrous an asshole as the villain Damon was impersonating in that skit (and Marty’s reach on society is, of course, much more limited), this character is still a world-class dirtbag. Marty Supreme instantly joins the annals of great movies about awful characters whose worst traits the film just keeps upping the ante on, challenging the audience to keep following along, and challenging the actor to find whatever shreds of compelling humanity might keep us wanting more. If there was any doubt left that Timothée Chalamet is a truly great talent – and I myself have had those doubts once or twice, usually when he’s playing someone overly somber or humorless – it’s thoroughly extinguished here. This is the part Chalamet was born to play, the kind of showstopping acting challenge that the great American legends of the 70s or 80s – particularly Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro – cut their teeth on. Marty is endlessly manipulative, almost never truthful, cynically uses every single person who comes into his life, and is bursting at the seams with ridiculous unearned bravado – and yet Chalamet makes him utterly captivating, a great film character you cannot take your eyes off of, in part because of the various ways he subtly communicates how Marty himself doesn’t seem to believe any of this bullshit either.

I kept thinking of The Catcher in the Rye while watching Marty Supreme, and how Marty is basically Holden Caulfield but ten years older and really into table tennis. He’s someone who’s deeply fucked up, knows there’s something broken somewhere deep inside of him, and never stops moving, never stops hustling, out of an obvious fear that letting silence fill his mind for any fleeting moment will spread that internal chasm yawning open, never to close again. It’s a long dark night of a very tortured soul, told from the perspective of a guy who refuses to admit he is in fact tortured, and keeps insisting the rest of the world just doesn’t get it yet. And as in Salinger’s book, it all ends with the hero in tears, having come down to earth long enough to start feeling the parts of himself he’s refused to understand.

The film’s first half-hour or so is a masterful example of gradually peeling back layers of characterization: starting with Marty’s desperation and bluster, then showing him at a tournament where he proves to be very good, stringing us along to start wondering whether or not this guy has the juice he says he has – only to reach the final round of the tournament and be confronted with the difference between someone who is ‘very good’ at what they do, and someone who is actually great. Marty falls on the wrong side of that line; he knows it as well as we do, and when we get back to New York for the main action of the movie, the question becomes whether Marty can fill the gap between ‘very good’ and ‘genuinely great’ with an overwhelming barrage of weapons-grade bluster and bottomless capacity for shamelessness. Viewed in the year of our lord 2025, it’s impossible not to connect that central question to the fundamental dynamic of the entire American experiment: is it ever actually possible to tell a lie so hard, so many times, that it gets you over the line from where you are to where you need to be? I’ve long said that Phillip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff is one of the greatest movies ever made about this country, an expression of the American id in all its insane ambition and restlessness, made manifest through the early space program, all wrapped in an epic that is also about fame, media, and the construction of heroes and myths. Marty Supreme sort of feels like the dark inverse of that movie, a film about all the same ideas breathed through the imagined life of a single weirdo who can’t actually change the world, but still understands to his core how the kind of myth he wanted to embody gets constructed. Marty Mauser probably isn’t the cinematic hero we need right now, but goddammit if he isn’t the one we deserve.

Marty Supreme shares many great qualities, and many great collaborators, with 2019’s Uncut Gems, the two-hour heart attack directed by Josh Safdie and brother Benny: it’s also co-written and co-edited by Ronald Bronstein, paced and plotted with an intensity and audacity that outstrips the vast majority of action movies; it’s again shot with furious immediacy and bold, gritty color by the great Darius Kohndji, wearing its 70s aesthetic influences on its sleeves while earning a place on the shelf alongside them; it’s scored once more by Daniel Lopatin, whose electronic, deeply kinetic music frequently combines with the editing and imagery to make one feel like they’re briefly levitating out of their seat; and its central character is, like Adam Sandler’s tour-de-force performance six years ago, an endlessly fascinating bundle of self-destructive contradictions, one you can’t take your eyes off of even when it’s impossible to condone anything that’s going on. For long stretches, it wouldn’t be wrong to call Marty Supreme a sort of spiritual sequel to Uncut Gems. But I think that would be selling short some of the real artistic growth Josh Safdie exhibits here, an evolution I see in two places in particular:

First, in the supporting characters, who pop quite a bit more here than anyone managed to in Uncut Gems. The two major women in Marty’s life – childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) and retired actress Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow), both married and both in sexual relationships with Marty – exhibit similar ‘gaps’ in their characterization as Marty himself, a kind of palpable, compelling distance between what they say and what they do. Paltrow is a real pleasure to watch here, in part because she hasn’t played anyone other than Pepper Potts on film since the infamous Johnny Depp disaster Mortdecai in 2015. She’s a one-of-a-kind screen presence, and is utterly fantastic here, playing someone seasoned enough to spot Marty’s bullshit a mile away, but still ultimately captivated by it all the same; whether that’s because of pity, boredom, or genuine attraction is the question the performance embodies. And Rachel might be even more interesting, a woman Marty abandons and gaslights in absolutely appalling fashion, but who gradually reveals herself to have the same instincts for hustling and surviving as he does. There was a fascinating (if depressing) moment of sociological revealed preference in my screening, wherein a lie of Rachel’s is revealed, and everyone in the auditorium gasped – a lie that ultimately pales in comparison to the many (and much bigger) lies Marty has told leading up to that scene, none of which got the same reaction. We could chalk that up to misogyny (never a bad bet), or to the same impulse by which the current President is allowed to lie, cheat, and steal with utter impunity, while other leaders and politicians are still held to reasonable standards. Liars form their own realities, and sometimes we get swept up in them in spite of ourselves. In any case, A’zion is every inch as compelling as Chalamet here, and between this and the HBO comedy I Love LA, she’s been one of the major discoveries of 2025, an unpredictable screen presence unlike anyone else working today.

Second is the way Marty Supreme ends. For all of the objectively bonkers shit that happens across these two-and-a-half hours, the biggest swerve the movie takes might be its last one, in no small part because it is the film’s most down-to-earth and confrontationally human gambit: Marty confronting the fatherhood he keeps running away from, and being completely overwhelmed by it. In that last scene, Marty finally lets himself stand still; the chasm inside him does indeed burst wide, and the question we’re left with is whether what fills this space will somehow start to heal this guy. Probably not. But then again, we’ve followed this asshole this far, eyes glued to the screen as he leaves a very literal trail of destruction in his wake on his way to semi-fulfilling a completely Quixotic goal, because something about his humanity compels us. Maybe something about that humanity will now compel him, if he’s willing to sit with it long enough. It’s not the ending I was expecting, and I don’t think it’s an ending either Safdie brother could have built towards earlier in their careers (though it makes a very interesting complement to Benny’s statement on fatherhood in the final episode of Showtime’s The Curse with Nathan Fielder). But it’s the ending this movie needed, the thing that takes it from ‘delirious, audacious Grade-A entertainment’ to ‘a genuinely great movie.’ One of the year’s best, in my estimation, and one I cannot wait to revisit – preferably bringing along others who don’t know what they’re in for, and watching their jaws fall steadily agape as Safdie and Chalamet dial up the intensity.

Read the book 200 Reviews by Jonathan R. Lack in Paperback or on Kindle

Subscribe to PURELY ACADEMIC, our monthly variety podcast about movies, video games, TV, and more

Like anime? Listen to the podcast I host with Sean Chapman, JAPANIMATION STATION, where we review all sorts of anime every week. Watch on YouTube or Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.