Marty Supreme (2025)
Josh Safdie’s first solo directorial outing since the Safdie brothers went their separate ways confirms what many suspected: he’s the one who brought that particular brand of organised chaos to their collaborations. Marty Supreme plants itself in 1950s New York but refuses to behave accordingly, layering in an anachronistic 1980s synth-pop soundtrack featuring Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears. The temporal confusion feels deliberate. We follow Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a ping-pong prodigy stuck selling shoes, who believes himself destined for table tennis immortality. Loosely inspired by Marty Reisman’s actual life, the film tracks Mauser’s messy climb through the competitive circuit, burning through relationships with married neighbour Rachel (Odessa A’zion) and declining theatre star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) with all the moral sensitivity of a particularly ambitious sociopath.
Chalamet turns in what might be his most technically demanding performance yet. I say this because making an audience care about someone this relentlessly awful requires genuine skill, not just charisma. He succeeds, mostly. The supporting cast does admirable work with what they’re given. A’zion brings unexpected layers to a role that could easily have been just another long-suffering girlfriend type, and Paltrow sidesteps the obvious traps of playing faded glamour by locating something genuinely fragile underneath the surface.
Safdie’s signature suffocating atmosphere remains his greatest asset. That sense of perpetual forward momentum, the feeling that everything might explode at any second, works beautifully here. Cinematographer Darius Khondji shoots predominantly on 35mm with vintage Panavision lenses, achieving a visual texture that recalls 1970s character studies. This deliberate temporal mismatch serves the material well. Marty never quite fits anywhere he finds himself, a man convinced of his exceptional destiny in a world that keeps forgetting to confirm it. Daniel Lopatin’s electronic score compounds the disorientation, creating a sensory experience that keeps you deliberately off-kilter throughout.
But the film’s considerable strengths wrestle constantly with equally substantial weaknesses. At two and a half hours, it tests patience. A mid-film sequence involving a dog and some kind of reward scheme feels particularly pointless, the sort of material that should have been cut months before release. More troubling, though, is how the relentless pacing obscures character motivation. We watch Marty do things, certainly, fascinating things sometimes, but rarely understand why beyond some vague, almost abstract hunger for recognition. The female characters suffer most from this approach. Despite strong performances, they exist primarily to enable or endure Marty’s narcissism, which grows tedious.
The ping-pong sequences work better than expected, though calling this a sports film would be generous. Safdie has no interest in discipline, sportsmanship, or any of those conventional athletic virtues. This seems intentional. He’s examining ambition as pathology, that peculiarly American conviction that believing yourself exceptional somehow makes it true. The film’s closing moments gesture towards redemption, but this feels unearned given everything preceding it. A concession to conventional storytelling, perhaps, one that sits awkwardly with the otherwise uncompromising portrait of toxic self-regard.
Marty Supreme remains entertaining throughout. Safdie knows how to manufacture cinematic adrenaline, that much is certain. Yet finishing the experience leaves you oddly unsatisfied. Exhilarated, yes, but also wondering what, exactly, all those pyrotechnics were meant to reveal.