Director – Josh Safdie – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 149m
*****
In the 1950s, a young New Yorker with the odds against him is determined to become a top table tennis player – in cinemas from Friday, December 26th
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the 1950s. Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) has a dream. It is, admittedly, a pretty odd dream which involves him rising to the top of a sport to which no-one in his native America currently pays any attention: table tennis. Also, he is possessed of the quintessentially New York sensibility of the street smart hustler who can, he believes, sell anything to anyone. A mere 23 years of age, he is naive and optimistic, but if you think that means the hard realities of day-to-day living are about to grind him down, you’ve got another think coming. For Marty is nothing less than a force of nature, blessed with unshakeable self-belief. And he needs it, because in this seriocomic rollercoaster of a sports drama, the odds seem to be increasingly stacked against him at every turn.
On top of all this, Marty is at once the person who through shrewd manoeuvring on the one hand makes his own luck and slowly builds his own destiny, and through hubris on the other has an unfortunate tendency to shoot himself in the foot.. These two, out of control aspects of his personality are constantly at war with one another. Actor Timothée Chalamet has given us extraordinary characters in A Complete Unknown, James Mangold, 2024; Dune, Denis Villeneuve, 2021; Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino, 2017) but never one as conflicted and breathlessly complex as this, arguably his most compelling performance onscreen to date.
Driven forward by the little victories and constantly upended by the self-inflicted disasters of Marty, the pace is breathlessly energetic. At the start, he’s trying to sell his shoe store owner uncle Murray (Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman from Uncut Gems, Josh and Benny Saftie, 2019) ) the idea that table tennis – in which Marty claims to be he is uniquely positioned – could be the gateway to exponentially growing his shoe business: his uncle isn’t entirely buying the idea, but Marty’s cousin IS buying it, and pushing his dad accordingly.
Marty has a more immediate problem – his uncle doesn’t want to part with that sum of money his uncle owes Marty. And Marty needs it for a plane ticket to London to play in the international table tennis championships and make his fortune. Eventually, he borrows the office safe keys and takes the owed money. Some time after his return from London, his uncle will try to get him arrested for theft.
Rachel (Odessa A’zion), the girl Marty got pregnant, gave up waiting for him and married Ira Mizler (Emory Cohen from Detour, Christopher Smith, 2016; Brooklyn, John Crowley, 2015; The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance, 2012) who turned out to be violent and abusive. Yet, while Marty might initially deny the child to be his, Marty is still very much her partner, albeit at a distance, and when he gets into difficulties, she – along with Marty’s best mate, Wally (Tyler Okonmar), a taxi driver – is there to help him out. As. For instance, when he attempts to track down the missing, beloved dog of Ezra (Abel Ferrara, director of The Addiction, 1995; Bad Lieutenant, 1992; King of New York, 1990; The Driller Killer, 1979), who he has met in a hotel and was involved in an incident when he was in a room where the bath (which the desk clerk had warned was unsafe to use) fell through a floor onto the bath below. The dog appears to have been stolen, or at least, the ownership of it assumed, by a man living in the countryside outside the city.
In London, where Japanese competitor Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) is winning the tournament on account of his superior design of bat rather than any playing skill, Marty spots faded movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) in his hotel and manages to seduce her via a mixture of phone call and sales ability – he is, effectively, selling himself as the rising star of table tennis, and she, being someone who has married money to escape from the precarious existence of a movie actress, is hooked.
Her husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), as it happens, is a hugely successful businessman who sells ink, and Marty is able to persuade him of the power of someone like Marty representing his brand in the upcoming table tennis tournament in Japan. Then later, Marty tells him he doesn’t need the gig. And later still, he has to come crawling back on his hands and knees to get the gig back when he changes his mind. At which point, the husband is able to take advantage of Marty and abuse him however he wants, since Marty says he’ll do anything to get the gig. And so the trip to Tokyo follows the next morning…
Marty has already self-sabotaged by speaking his mind to Ram Sethi (Pico Iyer from documentary In Pursuit of Silence, Patrick Shen, 2015), the head of the international table-tennis. Which makes it even less likely that he’ll be able to realise his dream during his Japan trip…
Josh Safdie, who co-wrote the film with regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein, populates his film with a vast pantheon of memorable characters, some of them appearing only briefly on the screen, helped no end by casting director Jennifer Verditi, who has evolved her own system for casting non-actors as well as professionals (bit parts include Sandra Bernhardt, Fran Dreschler and David Mamet). With around 140 characters, this element adds a whole extra layer of verisimilitude to the piece.
You might think that at two and a half hours, the film would outstay its welcome, but the opposite is true; Safdie’s frenetic, freewheeling narrative constantly engages the viewer, who is completely absorbed throughout. As background characters come and go and more significant characters weave in and out of Marty’s narrative trajectory, this cleverly builds up both the world Marty already knows and the one into which he’s trying to break. And both 1950s Lower East Side New York and the nascent international table tennis world are fascinating. As, too, is the more sterile one of the retired actress and her wealthy businessman husband.
If the main protagonist can sometimes be a complete jerk, Chalomet so fully inhabits his character, and performs him so brilliantly, that he brings you along for the ride and you’ll be glued to the screen for the duration. It is, after all, a wild ride quite unlike any other.
Marty Supreme is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, December 26th.
Trailer: