Marty Supreme ~ Review

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Have you ever had one of those nightmares where you are stuck in some impossible situation, and every single choice you make is the wrong one? For example, you’re driving a car dangerously fast down a busy highway, and for no explicable reason, you decide, “You know what? This car would be a lot better without the steering wheel.” So, you go ahead and rip the steering wheel out, and now the car is careening every which way. Then you decide that it might be even more fun to douse yourself in gasoline. And to top it all off, a cigarette sounds really nice. Meanwhile, your conscious mind is screaming at you to STOP as you burst into a ball of flames and wake up in a cold sweat.
 
The experience of watching Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is like that nightmare I just described. You watch a character make catastrophically bad choices each and every time as he sinks deeper and deeper into desperation because of those choices. It’s a wild movie that comes closest to the feeling of a live-action Ralph Bakshi film.
 
The year is 1952, and Marty Mausner (Timothee Chalamet) is an insanely gifted ping pong player. So gifted that he’s the only American player to have qualified for the British Open. The thing about Marty is that his ego is larger than the size of the sun. He’s convinced that he’s the best ping pong player in the world and will defeat any challengers that come his way. Marty is so myopically convinced of his greatness that he believes everyone he encounters orbits him. Isn’t there some phrase about pride and falling? Anyhow, while in London, Marty seduces Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a former Hollywood starlet married to Pen Magnate Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank). However, Marty loses the British Open to Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) and thus begins Marty’s fall from grace. You see, Marty is desperate to get to Japan for the World Table Tennis Championship, but he doesn't have the cash. So Marty starts making irrational decisions to get there. Such as hustling a bunch of New Jersey bowlers with his buddy Wally (Tyler the Creator), or falling in with a mobster named Ezra (Abel Ferrara). Marty will do just about anything to get to that Ping Pong tournament. That includes enlisting his childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) to help in his schemes to get money…and did I mention Rachel is pregnant with his child?

Marty Supreme is a bizarre, hilarious, and incredibly stressful trip through a New York underbelly filled with hucksters, weirdos, and various scumbums. It is nominally about ping pong, but Safdie directs the ping pong sequences like he’s staging epic action scenes. As usual with a Safdie project, the film is populated with actors who feel like they were just pulled off the street.
 
I love movies that create their own world, and Marty Supreme really draws you into its strange vibe. It’s jittery, scuzzy, and alive. However, because of that depth to the world, the film has a tendency to be discursive, and it will get sidetracked with various tangents before coming back to its main story. However, when the movie feels this lived-in, that’s hardly a complaint.
 
The script by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein makes Marty one of the most unlikeable protagonists of 2025, but also makes you root for him…even when he’s making the worst decisions. A lot of that credit goes to Chalamet, who gives Marty an intense manic energy that makes him hard to like, but you can’t stop looking at him. Paltrow brings a world-weary sadness to her role as a starlet who had to give up her dreams and wants to be loved. The real standout here is A’Zion, who sees right through Marty’s bullshit and sees the good in him. It’s a role that could have easily been nothing, but A’Zion gives the character an internal moral compass outside of Marty’s orbit.
 
Marty Supreme is ultimately about living an authentic life. However, in order to actually get there, you have to let all your delusions crash and burn around you. But perhaps the real irony of life is that we’re all just desperately clinging to our delusions and refuse to let them die. That’s my read, anyway, but maybe that’s my self-delusion.
 
Three and a half out of four stars.