Josh Safdie’s first solo-directed feature since 2008, Marty Supreme, is a kinetic love letter to New York hustle that volleys between sports underdog tale, screwball caper and melancholy star-is-born fable.
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a fast-talking 1952 Lower-East-Side shoe-store clerk who bets everything on table-tennis stardom—then keeps doubling down until the table itself shakes.
What begins as a scrappy origin story—Marty robbing his uncle’s till for a one-way ticket to the London championships—spirals into a globe-trotting odyssey of scam jobs, failed romances and show-stopping trick-shot showdowns. Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein (Uncut Gems) keep the dialogue ricocheting like a steel ball, while cinematographer Darius Khondji lenses every smoky pool hall and neon Tokyo arena as if it were a lost Weegee photograph come alive.
Timothée Chalamet has never been this live-wire: limbs akimbo, jaw forever mid-sentence, eyes calculating the next angle. He makes Marty arrogant, hilarious, borderline toxic—and yet you root for him the way you’d root for a city that refuses to sleep. Opposite him, Odessa A’zion crackles as childhood flame Rachel, whose own cons rival Marty’s, while Gwyneth Paltrow delivers career-best vulnerability as Kay Stone, a faded 1930s starlet trading security for one last taste of spark.
Daniel Lopatin’s score fuses be-bop percussion with synth-pop thunder, cueing Tears for Fears and Peter Gabriel needle drops that anachronistically—and perfectly—echo Marty’s dream of “owning the future.” Production designer Jack Fisk rebuilds 1950s Manhattan down to the gum stains, then flips the board for glittering international arenas where orange balls streak like comets across mint-green courts.
At 149 minutes, Marty Supreme occasionally lets a subplot dangle, but every loose thread feeds the film’s larger thesis: ambition is its own addiction, and the score is never settled. By the time the final serve lands, Safdie has delivered both an uproarious sports comedy and a bruised meditation on selling out versus cashing in. Strap in—this is the fastest, funniest, most bittersweet ride of the holiday movie season, and it’s game, set, match for Chalamet’s dramatic range.