If folks were disappointed that The Smashing Machine wasn’t just Uncut Gems 2: Howie Ratner Learns How to Lift, they’ll be absolutely delighted by Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. It’s a continuation of the storytelling throughline that Safdie established with his brother Bennie in their last few films — white-knuckle insanity on the streets of New York taken to absurdist extremes, grounded in a thoroughly-brilliant performance by a uniquely-talented lead — but placed in a more-distant time period, with more textures and styles for him to play with. You can practically feel just how much fun the director is having with this particular picture, and, though it may be typically nerve-wracking as most of his features are, there’s a strangely light and effervescent quality here, as its protagonist stumbles into one rake after another through a combo of his ego, dreams of stardom, and hideous fortune.
Loosely based on the life of ping-pong champ Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme best resembles a lost sports film from the early ‘80s – All the Right Moves, Personal Best, The Color of Money, Breaking Away – with a decidedly modern protagonist and a Hill-Scorsese approach to building chaotic tension. Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet) may look like your average shoe salesman in early ‘50s Manhattan, but he’s thoroughly unsatisfied with the fit. He’s got bigger goals and plans than eking out a meager existence in the Five Boroughs, living with his mom (Fran Drescher), marrying the right Jewish girl, and so on. He’s got skill, he’s got talent, he’s got a hell of a serve: he’s got the Touch with a paddle. He’s also got a great way of making trouble for himself: He gets a childhood friend pregnant before heading to the table-tennis championships in London, racks up a $5,000 hotel bill, which he promptly sends to the sport’s governing body, and goes out of his way to alienate every single person around him in his quest for attention and awe. All that bullshit goes away when, as Al Davis said, you “win, baby, win.” It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, provided you beat the competition. Marty doesn’t – he loses in disastrous fashion to the Japanese champion in the final round – and, after spending some time in Europe with the Harlem Globetrotters, returns home to find that his problems have quadrupled. The only way out is for him to head to Japan and beat his rival, but that’s a long way off and will cost a lot of money to get there. What’s a dude to do?
As the meme goes, Marty is the platonic ideal of “quirked up white boy GOATed with the sauce,” possessing the necessary components for goofy-ass, nearly-inexplicable charisma that overwhelms a mark’s defenses. He’s got a fierce competitive streak, a brutal wit, a publicist’s eye for self-promotion, single-minded drive, and, most importantly, the talent to back up most of his boisterous claims. If he doesn’t have that in a given situation, he knows how to talk his way out of a problem – at least long enough to find a window to open and a fire escape to run down. To continue the Gems parallel, he’s Howie if the man could actually ball, placing Pete Rose-style bets on himself to hit the over on his threes, being just as catastrophically terrible for those around him, yet possessing the intangible quality that makes it easier to excuse when observing from afar. Much like Sandman then, Chalamet brings his A-game to the part, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine another actor in it – the glasses and make-up zits just wouldn’t fit as well on his contemporaries. He is a perfect brat, with his youthful swagger concealing the pathetic nerves behind it, and the fact that we don’t reject this character like a container of quickly-consumed gas station sushi is a reflection of how much depth he brings to Marty. Get ready for that statue, dude. You’re heading to the mountaintop, should justice prevail in the minds of Oscar voters.
His supporting cast is, like most Safdie features, comprised of quirkily-placed established talents and non-actors that run the gamut from “Who the fuck is that?” to “Wait, what the fuck is he doing in this?” The duality is represented by one couple, with Gwenyth Paltrow as an aging movie star and Kevin O’Leary as her husband, the CEO of a pen company, both of whom take an interest in Marty’s career. Paltrow’s a sturdy rock for Chalamet to woo and wow, who is as fascinated by the young man’s affections as she is exasperated with his youthfulness, and O’Leary is beautifully cast as the physical representation of industrial soul-sucking exploitation. Imagine Guy Peace in The Brutalist if the actor had legitimate experience in strip-mining businesses for parts (and if Brady Corbet settled on a milder, less-violent form of sexual humiliation for his protagonist to undergo in the third act). You’d get O’Leary here, who radiates a detestable vibe from the minute he arrives on screen. The rest of the ensemble is fantastic in their own ways, with particular praise going to Tyler, the Creator, as one of Marty’s hustling buddies; Philippe Petit as another ping-pong champion with a dark past; and the one and only Abel Ferrara as a dog-lover with a sack full of cash and some terrible timing.
Yet, as repellent as Marty can frequently be, I doubt those who complain about “unlikable protagonists” will be out in full force, given just how thoroughly Safdie puts him through the wringer. There’s a self-destructive aspect to Marty’s actions – he is perpetually to blame for the situations he finds himself in — but there’s also just some legitimately bad fucking luck that comes his way, nor are the rest of the people in his life angelic passers-by, who would stay out of trouble if he weren’t actively in their lives. It also helps that he grows in character throughout the film, as I think a bit of the reason Gems was so despised by a certain segment of its viewership was that Howie remained a fundamentally static character — it was his world that was crazy and ever-changing, with his bizarre certainty that he would win out remaining the only constant. That the Safdies went out and made “based-on-true story” sports movies with parallel messages shouldn’t be ignored, but it’s in how that differ that makes them interesting. Both are, in essence, about growing up and learning that one’s fallible, though of course they approach this from dissimilar perspectives. I’d argue that both are successful at what they set out to do, but there’s no denying how much of a show-of-force Marty Supreme is compared to the more atmospheric tone of The Smashing Machine. It certainly puts its lead through a more exaggerated and comical hell, that’s for sure.
At a certain point in any narrative like this, one’s satisfaction with schadenfreude runs out and empathy kicks in, and Safdie’s well aware of that fact. Hence, the acts of God come along to throw us for a loop – bad plumbing, Penn Jillette, Jersey hicks at a Bowling alley – and keep the story running at a Tex Avery-like pace. The story is nearly unbelievable yet ferociously funny, and that trademark Safdie stress boils over early and keeps rolling, bubbling over the pot’s lid all the way until the credits roll and the burner is turned off. The vibes are impressive – Darius Kondji’s cinematography has rarely been this vivid, the period-setting is appropriately strange for a Safdie feature, and the entire enterprise feels surreal, especially with the collision of anachronism (the soundtrack is stacked with new wave cuts from Public Image, Ltd., Peter Gabriel, and New Order, among others) and cosmic oddity (just you wait until you see the film’s title sequence).
Stress. That’s the operative word here. I’m sure you’ll hear plenty of discussion about how stressful it is to watch Marty Supreme, much like it was when Uncut Gems came out, but there’s been little in the way of discussion as to why that is and how Safdie achieves that effect. There’s an element of sensory overload to those scenes – oftentimes, they’re not actually suspenseful or nerve-wracking. Instead, they’re overwhelming, with a cacophony of Altman-esque cross-talk scattering our attention across the sound mix, throwing us off balance until Safdie gives us a detail to focus on. The pace has a similar ethos, in which the narrative beats are started like balls heading through a perpetual motion machine: as soon as you think it’s come to a stop, you come to find they’re being reloaded, soon to drop back down through the tubing and levers. Much like one of those machines, Safdie has precisely engineered this feature, fine-tuning it to ensure seamless operation, with every diversion and descent into chaos expertly slotted to fire every single synapse and activate every pleasure receptor in one’s brain. Marty Supreme is as much of a visceral pleasure as it is an intellectual one, and it’s one of the best movies of 2025. There. There’s your mic drop.