Marty Supreme Review: Paddle to the Metal

Last year, when Timothée Chalamet came to Minnesota to promote A Complete Unknown, he mentioned he’d just wrapped a ping-pong drama called Marty Supreme. He had the hair, the moustache. He was Marty. The Oscar buzz for his Bob Dylan turn eventually dominated the conversation, but now here we are with Chalamet’s follow-up — and watching the actor throw himself into another period-piece marathon feels less like coincidence than compulsion. The man is chasing something, and it’s fascinating to witness.

Director Josh Safdie, working solo for the first time since 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, has crafted a sprawling historical fantasia loosely inspired by table tennis legend Marty Reisman. It’s 1952 New York, and Marty Mauser (Chalamet, Beautiful Boy) sells shoes in his uncle’s cramped Lower East Side shop while dreaming of ping-pong glory. His talent is real, his ambition is bottomless, and his moral compass is nonexistent. From London to Tokyo to the Great Pyramids and back, Marty schemes, seduces, and steamrolls anyone foolish enough to get in his way.

Chalamet is excellent here, make no mistake. He leans all the way into a character who is defiantly, almost aggressively unlikable — a young man so consumed by self-belief that empathy becomes collateral damage. The performance crackles with nervous energy, fast-talking desperation, and flashes of wounded-boy vulnerability. But here’s the rub: Marty never shifts gears. His constant failure of character becomes par for the course, and without any meaningful evolution across two and a half hours, a certain flatness develops. You admire the commitment without ever quite warming to the man.

The supporting cast is a mixed bag of treasures. Odessa A’zion (Hellraiser), also currently burning up HBO’s I Love L.A., delivers a firecracker turn as Rachel, Marty’s neighborhood girlfriend whose big emotions and bigger survival instincts make her the film’s secret weapon. Also appearing this year in Pools, she’s a serious talent on the verge of a role that will launch her into the stratosphere. Gwyneth Paltrow (Thanks for Sharing) looks stunning in Miyako Bellizzi‘s impeccable period costumes — those color-blocked silhouettes deserve their own Oscar campaign — but Kay Stone doesn’t get much of an arc to follow. The same goes for Fran Drescher and Sandra Bernhard, both criminally underused as, respectively, Marty’s mother and her neighbor.

Safdie reunites with cinematographer Darius Khondji, whose work on Uncut Gems established their visual shorthand. Shot mostly on 35mm with vintage anamorphic lenses, Marty Supreme has that same brash, electric energy — table tennis tournaments captured so you can actually follow the action, intimate scenes lit with period-appropriate elegance. Daniel Lopatin‘s synth-heavy score initially feels anachronistic, its ’80s textures landing in the early ’50s like a time traveler, but it works precisely because Safdie commits to the dissonance. The legendary Jack Fisk‘s (married to Sissy Spacek) production design resurrects multiple worlds with obsessive detail, from Orchard Street tenements to a faithfully reconstructed version of Lawrence’s legendary Broadway ping-pong parlor.

The film runs about fifteen minutes longer than necessary — editors Safdie and Ronald Bronstein (who also co-wrote) could have been more judicial with some narratively inert stretches. But when Marty Supreme connects, it connects hard, culminating in a gut-punch finale that recontextualizes everything that came before. Your enjoyment will ultimately depend on how much you can stomach the man himself. Chalamet is giving it everything, and whether this new Academy embraces such an uncompromising character remains to be seen. He’s got stiff competition from actors playing warmer souls. But nobody can say he didn’t swing for the fences.