Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme

The Safdie Brothers, the nerve-jangling filmmakers behind films like Good Time and Uncut Gems, have gone their separate ways, yet somehow both ended up making sports dramas in 2025. Benny Safdie went the earnest route with The Smashing Machine, while Josh Safdie puts his nails on the chalkboard and draws them down slowly with the eye-twitch-inducing Marty Supreme, a film about a complete twerp who ruins lives in the pursuit of own perceived greatness. Starring Timothee Chalamet and very loosely based on the life of American ping pong pioneer Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme is a cinematic root canal, a film designed to make you nervous by association.

Chalamet gives a blazing performance as Marty Mauser, who in 1952 is hustling his way to the British Open…of ping pong. He’s a table tennis prodigy who is still, somehow, overestimating his own greatness. But Marty is convinced he’s about to win big in Britain and become the number one table tennis player in the world. Marty is a walking turn-off, rude, abrasive, and casually cruel. He abandons the married Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), with whom he had an affair, and later he denies her child is his. He brushes off his ill mother, he robs his uncle’s shoe store at gunpoint (granted, his uncle did not uphold his end of a bargain. Still!). Marty will stop at nothing to get his way and realize his own greatness, which only exists in his mind.

This is the whole film. Everything gets worse and Marty clings to his perceived greatness, sure that he’s just one match away from being seen as the phenom he knows he is. That confidence floats him in New York, but on the world stage, he’s bested by Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), a Japanese player whose cool calm is diametrically opposed to the twitchy, loud Marty. In no way is Marty prepared to absorb his loss, and so he spends the bulk of the film conspiring to get to Tokyo for a rematch with Endo and achieve the greatness he knows is his.

At times, Marty Supreme is a hard watch. Marty is just so goddamn awful, and Chalamet is so good as Marty that he’s impossible to look away from even as you wish someone would just push Marty into traffic and solve the problem for everyone. Marty is detestable, intolerable, a yapper and a liar and a thief and a phony and somewhere in there is, yes, a talented ping pong man but he simply cannot live with being known as second-best, and that self-aggrandizement spells doom for anyone who crosses his path. Marty is so deleterious to everyone around him it’s amazing that anyone talks to him more than once.

The film, which is co-written and co-edited by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, does not attempt to win us over to Marty’s side. There is no effort to make him likeable, but for all that he is a walking red flag, there is something compelling and even charming about Marty. He’s just so confident, so assured, he’s a grifter and a con man but he’s fascinating anyway. He woos a retired movie star, Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is a generation older and far worldlier and yet even she cannot resist Marty’s full-court press. Also, this film has the worst screen kissing in recent memory, just real gross kissing, no attempt to make it pretty or romantic for camera. Tip of the cap to Josh Safdie for that direction, it actually does set Marty Supreme apart that the film is so grossly unromantic. 

The only people who are at all resistant to Marty are rich men. Particularly in the form of Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), Kay’s rich husband who tries to work with Marty to promote ping pong. Milton sucks, but so does Marty, and they spend most of the movie verbally flaying each other, at least until Milton uses his power to humiliate Marty. It’s one of the only moments in the film of true sympathy for Marty. He’s trying to pull himself up—by hook or by crook—but against these rich men, he never stands a chance. He will never be able to beat Milton, for Marty has no real power. He can treat the women in his life terribly, he can use and abuse his ping pong friends, but these rich men, they have a power Marty can never touch.

At times, Marty Supreme plays like an allegory for America, centering on the kind of charismatic huckster that litters American history, including very recent history. But it’s also an intimate character study of the sacrifices regular people must make to succeed outside their social sphere. Marty’s athletic success opens doors to him—or it would if he could get out of his own way—but at every step and stage there are obstacles to him achieving advancement. Sometimes, it’s the natural consequence of sport, he’s not going to win every match. But a lot of the time it’s rich men with the kind of power Marty can only dream of—and he does dream of it—utilizing that power against him.

There is no question that Marty sucks, he’s an awful person, but there is also no question he might not be quite so awful if the world was just a little less hard. He’s a product of his environment, but not just in the way of poverty, he’s the product of an environment that makes advancement damn near impossible. For anyone whose dreams are bigger than eking out an existence in a tenement slum, the world will extract a pound of flesh and even still, the obstacles are unending. 

People will probably argue about the ending of Marty Supreme, whether Marty is redeemed, or if it makes every bad thing he’s done suddenly worth it, but that’s not the point of Josh Safdie’s final shot. It is simply catharsis, a letting go by a character hanging onto his will with his fingernails. Marty’s outcomes are a mixed bag, as it often is in life, and no, a sudden moment of true emotion does not redeem him or make his many ill behaviors okay. Marty is still a net negative for everyone around him, unreliable and untruthful and generally awful to be around. But he is also human, he is also capable of love and humility. Marty Supreme is a tooth-grinding nightmare about a sh-theel who is not all bad, and the country that breeds his brand of destructive self-confidence.

Marty Supreme will play exclusively in theaters from December 25, 2025.