The set-up is poetry. On one side of the table stands Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), Japan’s best table tennis player, a man who lost his hearing in the bombing of Tokyo and exists in a silence that brings only stillness. Across the green hardtop stands Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a man who has not—even for one second in his entire life—been still. He’s a hell of a table tennis player, the best in the U.S. But his skill, in table tennis and in life, relies on jittery energy. He can out-hustle anyone with ease. Anyone, that is, except Endo. And here they are, in the British Open finale. The year is 1952. It’s East vs. West, silent strength versus brash bravado. The winner won’t just win the match; they’ll prove their way is the correct way, and their opponent has been playing table tennis—maybe even been going through life—all wrong. Could one match carry more significance?

If it did, Marty Supreme would collapse into a heap of clichés. Thankfully, director Josh Safdie has no interest in going there and moves his sports narrative from the above showdown, which takes place in the first act, and throws it back into the New York streets and doesn’t stop to take a breath for another two hours. Marty Supreme appears to be an underdog sports drama, but it’s really the story of a New York City con man barely skirting the gutter, streaked with cinematographer Darius Khondji’s images that attach themself so close to Marty you can almost smell his desperation.

Though the majority of Marty Supreme does not take place around a ping-pong table, Marty bounces through life like a molecule vibrating at the intensity of the world around him. He is a go-getter who ricochets from scene to scene, person to person, graft to graft without pause or acknowledgment. Food crops up several times in the movie, but Marty never eats or drinks. He pauses long enough to bathe once, but the tub falls through the floor onto a hapless tenant (Abel Ferrara) bathing his dog—the dog is okay. Not even that slows Marty down. Just another obstacle in his way, another hurdle to clear. If table tennis doesn’t work, Marty could compete in the decathlon.

Safdie and co-screenwriter Ronald Bronsteinpack Marty Supreme with so much story and so many characters that it would take as long to explain here as it would to watch the movie. The broad strokes: still in his early 20s, Marty is a table tennis player who might be the best in the world, but he doesn’t have the money to do anything about it. So he hustles one mark after another, trying to raise funds. Sometimes that means enlisting his friend (Tyler “the Creator” Okonma), sometimes that means shaking down a business magnate (Kevin O’Leary). Marty assigns them the same value. Complicating things are his needy mother (Fran Drescher), his pregnant girlfriend (Odessa A’zion)—who’s married to a neighbor—and a once-famous actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) who is sleeping with Marty despite her marriage to the business magnate.

There are others. So many wonderful others that Marty Supreme feels like a movie ripped from another time. Along with Ferrara, Safdie assembles a top-level cast of mugs that look like they were pulled out of mid-century flophouses and seedy saloons and beamed into the 21st century.

Marty Supreme is not for the faint of heart. Much like Good Time and Uncut Gems—both written and directed by Safdie, with his brother Benny—Marty Supreme hits the high register quick and sustains it through every burned bridge, every torched companion. That Safdie can take all of that and still bring it back to the sports narrative is incredible.

Still, kudos to Chalamet: Unlike A Complete Unknown—where Chalamet’s performance is so enmeshed in the works of Bob Dylan that he tries to unlock something about the musician and share his findings with the audience—Chalamet’s Marty has no interest in explaining what makes this Sammy run. Glory, sure. Vindication, probably. Fandom, certainly. But there’s something else driving him, something he’s withholding from others, maybe even himself. There’s a hint in the movie’s final shot that Marty has finally found the one thing that has eluded him his entire life. Then again, after all we’ve seen him do up until now, is there any sense it’ll be enough?

Marty Supreme (2025)
Directed by Josh Safdie
Written by Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Produced by Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, Timothée Chalamet, Anthony Katagas, Josh Safdie
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Odessa A’zion, Tyler Okonma, Fran Drescher, Géza Röhrig, Pico Iyer, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin O’Leary, Abel Ferrara, Koto Kawaguchi
A24, Rated R, Running time 150 minutes, Premiered Oct. 6, 2025 at the New York Film Festival

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