Marty Supreme ★★★1/2

Availability: Showing widely internationally in theaters. As an A24 production, it should hit basic streaming services the last week in January, and HBO Max, which has a deal with A24, mid-April. See JustWatch here for future online and purchase availability.

Follow the Dog

In our age of hustlers—whether politicians, crypto bros, influencers, venture capitalists, Musk, the US president—Marty Mauser, a creature of the 1950s, would run with the best of them. What makes Marty stand out is not only his unrelenting reliance on, even faith in, the con and the deal, but his field of play: ping pong.

Marty (Timothée Chalamet, far right) and his taxi driver buddy Wally (musician Tyler the Creator, left) practice their con of unsuspecting good old boys at a bowling alley.

From the moment it opens, this latest film by director Josh Safdie blasts in your ears and face, with its music, its pace, its camerawork, and especially with its main character Marty, a New York City shoe salesman competing to be the best ping pong—make that table tennis—player in the world. Based loosely on a real “bad boy” of the ping pong world, Marty Reisman, Timothée Chalamet talks over, shouts at, swaggers around, charms, and tries to game everyone he encounters: a glamorous aging former movie star, a married girlfriend, the Black taxi driver buddy, plutocrats, gangsters, his employer uncle. And his mother. Like Marty, most of them are hustlers.

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A wild and crazy ride.

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Josh Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein revel in Jewish scrappers, low lifes, and over-the-top, on-the-edge, unsavory but curiously engaging characters like Adam Sandler’s New York City jeweler in “Uncut Gems” (2019), co-directed with brother Benny Safdie. Descended from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops, Safdie and Bronstein’s penchant for zany excess will have some viewers questioning the authenticity of the characters, mumbling about over-acting, and longing for a pause in the rapidly unspooling story to gather their thoughts or just relax a bit. Better, we think, to give yourself to the wild and crazy ride.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji takes a static picture of a ping pong tournament

and turns it into dynamic, exciting, ecstatic excess, the ping pong ball

much like the tennis ball in "Challengers."

Like “Uncut Gems” and “Good Times” (2017), another Safdie/Bronstein collaboration, “Marty Supreme” is a one-man show. There’s rarely a scene without a hyper Chalamet, and when he’s in a scene, he dominates. The surrounding characters are not, however, patsies. All are distinctive in their own right and have enough “attitude” to challenge Marty while at the same time succumbing to his energy, magnetism, and belief in himself. There’s the aging star (Gwyneth Paltrow), wonderfully icy and horny, at once knowing and vulnerable; the taxi driver (musician Tyler the Creator); the gangster (Abel Ferrara); the wealthy investor (Kevin O'Leary from “Shark Tank”); the shoe-shop owning uncle (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), who really believes he can shoe-horn manic Marty into managing the store; and especially his pregnant girlfriend (Odessa A’Zion), a grifter who can match Marty blow-for-blow.

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The visual experience is the cinematic equivalent of an ADHD teen scrolling social media—one damn thing after another.

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The script is as over-the-top as the characters. There are cons within cons, some of them impossible to follow. If at every point you can figure out where Moses, the black dog, is, who he belongs to, who is trying to get him, and for what purpose, give yourself a gold star. The visual experience is the cinematic equivalent of an ADHD teen scrolling social media—one damn thing after another, and one too many silly scenes: a bathtub crashing into the tub a floor below, with bathers in both; a computer mock-up of sperm wiggling into an ova. As in “One Battle After Another,” you have to accept something less than full understanding or tolerate frustration. At the same time, the narrative is classically chronological; no flashbacks, no time displacements. In the end, while you might feel you’ve never seen anything quite like it, it’s at heart old-fashioned filmmaking, super-charged for Gen Z.

Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) can look deceptively innocent, here waiting for the phone call from Marty that never comes.

Table tennis is the setting for the film, and the matches are vivid, carried to ecstatic excess with the rest of the story. Cinematographer Darius Khondji brings the ping pong ball to life, much like the tennis ball in “Challengers” (2024). Khondji also uses extreme close-ups, to great effect, especially of Chalamet’s intentionally imperfect face.

Timothée Chalamet lets the camera zoom in on his imperfect face.

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If you don’t like soundtracks that drive a plot and demand attention (that’s usually us), you won’t like this one.

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Extremes mark the soundtrack as well. Longtime Safdie collaborator Daniel Lopatin almost propels you out of your seat. If you don’t like soundtracks that drive a plot and demand attention (that’s usually us), you won’t like this one. The music is derived from two eras: the ‘50s and the ‘80s. The ‘50s—Marty Reisman’s universe—makes sense. The ‘80s not so much (the myth of the Reagan-era self-made entrepreneur?). Lopatin describes the score as “buoyant sounds—compiling hundreds of mallet strikes, tines, and quick flutes to follow mercurial Marty around….who is a ping pong ball of a human himself.”

Gwyneth Paltrow's aging star, left, is both knowing and vulnerable.

One could view the impulsive Marty as a bad boy without an ethical core, leaving everyone he touches worse off. He can also be unlikeable or at least unappealing, maybe enough to render the film unredeemable: Auschwitz jokes (“I can say that; I’m Jewish”); using a man’s dead son as part of a con; maybe murdering someone (we think not or, if so, like Wile E. Coyote, they’re not really dead). Except Marty has that sense of being “alive” in a way most people are not, of taking on the world in a way most people cannot. You may think Chalamet is one of those over-exposed stars, that you know it’s him in every scene. But he brings it all in an outstanding performance. Like Marty, he’s irresistible.

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She says: The kind of film I don’t usually like (for all the negative reasons stated above), but I was entertained from beginning to end.

He says: Timothée Chalamet is the most versatile actor since Meryl Streep.

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Date: 2025

Director: Josh Safdie

Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler the Creator, Abel Ferrara, Kevin O'Leary, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Odessa A’Zion

Country: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 150 minutes

Other Awards: 20 wins and 168 other nominations