‘Marty Supreme’ review: Timothee Chalamet powers Josh Safdie’s bracing spin on the sports movie

Dir: Josh Safdie. US. 2025. 149mins

Marty Mauser, the driven young protagonist of Marty Supreme, will stop at nothing to achieve his dream of becoming a champion table tennis player, but director Josh Safdie daringly asks his audience if we actually want to see him get his happy ending. This propulsively entertaining, bracingly amoral character study is powered by Timothee Chalamet’s performance as a despicable egoist who happily manipulates those around him. Much like Safdie’s previous features Good Time and Uncut Gems (both co-directed with younger brother Benny), Marty Supreme makes no apologies for its self-centred antihero, and the result is a picture that’s as swaggering as its titular athlete.

 Perverts the familiar cinematic notion of the lovable sports underdog

Chalamet should garner significant awards-season attention when the film opens on Christmas Day in the US and a day later in the UK, before rolling out internationally. Part sports drama, part thriller and part colourful period picture, Marty Supreme will cater to arthouse crowds enamoured of Safdie’s earlier work, which similarly sent viewers on unpredictable rides.

In the early 1950s, Marty (Chalamet) is a 23-year-old New Yorker from a working-class Jewish family who’s convinced he’s one of the world’s best table tennis players. He sets his sights on winning the British Open in London, which requires him to ignore his problems at home — including accidentally getting his married girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) pregnant. But the tournament does not go as expected, sending Marty into a spiral once he returns to America, as he desperately tried to cobble together enough money to pay his way to the next big contest in Tokyo.

This is Safdie’s first solo feature since 2008’s The Pleasure Of Being Robbed — his brother Benny’s solo debut, The Smashing Machine, launched in Venice — and he’s operating with a noticeably larger budget and on a grander canvas. Production designer Jack Fisk and Uncut Gems cinematographer Darius Khondji give the film an epic scope that emphasises precise period details. Such lavish treatment might seem odd for a story about a ping-pong player, but that disconnect plays perfectly into Marty Supreme’s lively clash of tones and styles. Safdie provocatively inserts the occasional 1980s hit onto the soundtrack, even though the film is set decades earlier.

Marty Supreme’s most combustible element is Chalamet, who relishes Marty’s bullheaded selfishness. Whereas the Oscar-nominated actor’s portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown was an equal mixture of charm and arrogance, here he depicts Marty as an entitled, callous jerk who manages to bowl people over through the sheer force of his ambition. Whether seducing an ageing movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow) or fast-talking her wealthy, unaware husband (Kevin O’Leary), Marty has an incredible ability to win people over, despite his abrasive personality.

That’s a credit to Chalamet, who wields his sex appeal and unflappable poise so convincingly that we never question Marty’s queasy tractor-beam appeal. Those around him are simply sucked in, entranced by his refusal to take no for an answer — not to mention his talent for reading people and knowing just what to say in order to get what he wants.

Marty’s quest to acquire the necessary funds for the Tokyo tournament will find him exploring myriad options and potentially burning bridges, and put him in contact with several shady individuals. Safdie does terrific work populating the picture with distinctive faces for crucial small roles, including filmmaker Abel Ferrara as a dangerous hood. But the finest supporting performance belongs to A’zion, whose Rachel proves to be as shrewd as her on-and-off lover. A’zion gives Marty Supreme some of its sharpest laughs as her character serves as the closest thing this film has to a moral compass.

The table tennis matches are electrifying, but they intentionally lack the usual rooting-interest conventionality of most sports films. Safdie has never judged his unethical protagonists, simply following them as they do one bad thing after another, and so the ping-pong sequences boast a fascinating ambivalence.

So self-assured, yet so monstrous to those in his orbit, Marty feels like a nightmare version of the American dream, a suspicion bolstered by the film’s placement in the 1950s at a time when the US was ascendant after the Second World War. The character’s heedless pursuit of what he thinks is owed him represents the worst kind of “American exceptionalism” while perverting the familiar cinematic notion of the lovable sports underdog. And yet, we cannot take our eyes off of Chalamet, who makes Marty impossible to like but weirdly easy to follow on his twisted odyssey.