‘Marty Supreme’ Review

There is a particular kind of cinematic electricity that only comes around once in a while. It is the kind that crackles under your skin, speeds up your heartbeat, and makes you feel like you are watching something dangerous and alive. Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie and co-written by Ronald Bronstein, lives in that rare space. It is chaotic, exhausting, funny, and unexpectedly sincere. It is also deeply frustrating in ways that feel intentional rather than accidental, which is part of what makes it so compelling to sit with long after the credits roll.

At its center is Timothée Chalamet delivering one of the most ferocious performances of his career. Not his most likable character. Not his most restrained work. But absolutely one of his most alive. There is a sense that he is not just playing Marty Mauser, but combusting through him. Marty is the kind of character who walks into rooms already convinced of his own future legend, even when nobody else in the room has any idea who he is. He is ridiculous and magnetic in equal measure. Chalamet leans into that contradiction with total commitment, never once apologizing for Marty’s ego, hunger, or relentless drive.

The premise itself sounds almost absurd on paper. A man chasing glory through the world of competitive table tennis. And yet, Safdie treats this world with the same intensity and seriousness that other filmmakers reserve for boxing rings or battlefields. The underground dens where Marty hones his craft feel dangerous, sweaty, and charged. The lighting flickers like a bad omen. The air feels thick with desperation. You can almost smell the old carpet and nervous sweat. It is in these spaces that the film finds its pulse and its personality.

What makes Marty Supreme work as more than just an exercise in volume and velocity is how it interrogates the mythology of ambition. This is not a clean sports movie about triumph. It is a film about delusion as fuel. About how the American dream can be both a motivator and a trap. Marty wants greatness not because it will bring peace or purpose, but because he cannot imagine himself as anything else. There is something tragic in that, even when the film is at its funniest.

One of the most unexpected emotional anchors of the story is Gwyneth Paltrow, who returns to the screen with a performance that is both graceful and quietly piercing. Her character Kay is written as someone who mirrors Marty rather than simply supporting him. She understands choices. She understands pivots. She understands the cost of ambition in a way Marty refuses to acknowledge. Paltrow brings a stillness to the film that balances its frantic energy. It is one of the best uses of her screen presence in years.

Josh Safdie’s direction feels like a natural evolution of the muscular, anxiety driven style he helped define with Good Time and Uncut Gems. The pacing is breathless. The camera feels handcuffed to Marty’s nervous system. Scenes bleed into one another with the urgency of someone who cannot afford to slow down. There are moments where the film feels overlong, especially in the middle stretch, but even then it rarely loses its sense of propulsion. When it works, it feels like being strapped to a live wire.

The craft across the board is exceptional. Darius Khondji’s cinematography gives the film a textured, grimy beauty that feels rooted in a specific time and place. Jack Fisk’s production design builds a world that feels both heightened and completely tactile. Daniel Lopatin’s score thrums with anxiety and momentum. Every department is clearly operating at the highest level, in service of a film that wants to feel larger than life without losing its grime.

Daniel Lopatin’s score deserves its own breath inside this film. There was something strangely intimate about the way the music found me. I know this may not make sense to everyone, but for a story set in 1950’s New York, carried by a sound that feels like it drifted in from the 80’s, it unlocked a doorway I did not expect. It pulled me back to the background scores of AR Rahman in the 1990’s, a sound that lived quietly inside my childhood, that shaped my sense of feeling through music before I even knew how to name it. The recognition was immediate and overwhelming. It may only fully land for South Asian readers, but it felt real enough that I could not keep it to myself. I fell completely in love with the soundtrack. After the screening, I had the chance to tell Daniel Lopatin about this strange connection, and he told me it was a coincidence. Even so, I told him how beautiful it felt, how perfect it was, to feel those memories surface inside his work. For me, the score did not just accompany the film. It haunted it, and it haunted me.

That said, the film is not without real flaws. The parallels to Uncut Gems are impossible to ignore, and at times Marty Supreme feels like a looser, shinier cousin to that film. It follows a very similar rhythm. It leans into familiar chaos. It sometimes mistakes escalation for evolution. While it is entertaining, it is not always as sharp or as focused. There are stretches where the film feels indulgent, as if it is too in love with its own energy to cut back when it probably should.

There is also a complexity in how the film uses its historical and cultural setting that feels both fascinating and uneasy. It gestures toward larger ideas about post war identity, national mythology, and the way people define themselves against history, but it does not always fully land those ideas. At times the history feels more like texture than substance. It gives the film weight visually and thematically, but it can also feel like a backdrop rather than a fully integrated force within the story. That tension makes certain choices feel morally complicated in a way that never fully resolves.

The supporting cast is stacked and used in ways that feel genuinely inspired. Odessa A’Zion is a revelation. She brings a sharpness and unpredictability that feels vital to the film’s energy. Kevin O’Leary is shockingly effective in a role that could have easily gone wrong. Abel Ferrara’s presence carries a strange kind of meta electricity, like a living artifact from another era of American cinema stepping into this modern chaos. Even the smallest roles are cast with faces that feel lived in, strange, and memorable. It gives the film a sense of density and personality that many larger studio films lack.

What ultimately makes Marty Supreme stick is its final emotional stretch. Without giving anything away, the last act reframes much of what came before it. It softens the film in ways that feel earned. It allows space for reflection. It asks whether a life built entirely on hunger can ever make room for something quieter and more human. It is here that Chalamet does his most impressive work, pulling back just enough to let vulnerability bleed through the cracks of bravado. It is beautiful and unsettling at the same time.

This is a film about performance in the deepest sense. About a man performing for the world and for himself without ever quite knowing where the persona ends and the person begins. Marty does not lie to survive. He lies to exist. He mythologizes his own life because without the myth, there is nothing he wants to face. That is a surprisingly sad thing at the center of such a loud and kinetic movie.

Is Marty Supreme perfect? No. It is long. It is too indulgent at times. It sometimes mistakes movement for meaning. But it is alive in a way that most films are not. It is ambitious. It is strange. It is full of risk. It feels made by people who believe in the power of cinema to overwhelm you and leave you breathless.

Josh Safdie has made a film that feels like a nervous breakdown wrapped in a fever dream wrapped in a sports movie. It is exhausting to watch and hard to forget. Timothée Chalamet proves once again that he is one of the most daring actors working today, not because he plays things safe, but because he leans into excess with intelligence and instinct.

Marty Supreme is a mess. It is also a minor miracle. It is not just about table tennis or competition. It is about the terrifying, intoxicating idea of building your entire soul around the need to be seen. And it asks, quietly but firmly, what is left when the noise fades. You may not love it. You may not even like it at times. But you will feel it. And sometimes, that is more than enough.

MARTY SUPREME CHRISTMAS DAY!