‘Marty Supreme’ Film Review: Timothée Chalamet Seduces Destiny in Josh Safdie’s Monumental Test of Self-Worth

Josh Safi opened Marty Supreme With a very vulgar kind of confidence, suggesting that ambition would now be regarded as a decidedly physical act. He does this by staging the opening credits as conception, where a human egg is fertilized and immediately aestheticized into a spinning ping-pong ball over flashing ’80s synths, as if destiny were something you could create simply by force of will. Timothée Chalamet’s impossibly arrogant title character spends the next two and a half hours behaving like a man who’s convinced the universe has already retroactively favored him, leaving everyone else trapped inside the aftershocks of his self-esteem.

Set in 1952 but pulsating with a restlessness that doesn’t belong to any one decade, Marty Supreme This is Josh Safdie’s second solo feature since 2008. pleasure of being robbedand follows Marty Mouser, a Lower East Side shoe salesman whose prodigious table-tennis talent matters less than his belief that talent should entitle him to speed, reach, and forgiveness. Safdie understands that this belief is both comical and fatalistic, which allows the film to tease Marty while also keeping an eye on the damage he leaves behind.

Marty walks in right in the middle of the action of the movie. He is sleeping with a married woman in the back of the family shoe store whom he wants to avoid, and he talks with certainty about their future. Chalamet overclocked him verbally, playing half-a-beat ahead of everyone else in the room because he refused to wait for permission to finish a thought. This confidence sows the seeds for what comes next as each subsequent choice grows logically out of Marty’s refusal to accept friction or failure as anything more than a temporary inconvenience.

Safdie portrayed New York in the early ’50s as a pressure cooker in which money, sex, and ambition swirl through the same greasy ventilation system, making the table-tennis club a combined flop house, chapel, and illusion factory that endlessly stokes Marty’s male imagination. Marty thrives in this compressed environment because compression rewards thrust, yet the moment he releases it – particularly during a London encounter with the monstrously ineffective Koto Ando – the limits of his velocity become impossible to ignore. His refusal to participate with the other players, followed by his immediate transfer to the Ritz, serves as a form of strategic self-importance, as Marty has the impression that saw Being good matters at least as much, and often pays better. Gwyneth Paltrow’s affair with Kay Stone proceeds like a sweet-talk in which intimacy takes the place of capital, and Safdie lasts so long that Marty’s proximity to money prompts him to accidentally get involved. Losing the final to Endo spoils the coronation fantasy, although Safi puts off the real punishment until later.

A scene from ‘Marty Supreme’ Photo Credit: A24

Daniel Lopatin’s excellent score conveys the ambition more clearly than the dialogue and reconnects the film’s connection with history. The choice to fill the 1950s story with 80s synth and New Wave anthems creates a productive dissonance, as the music speeds toward the future while the characters remain trapped in old hierarchies. Lopatin’s signals behave like Marty’s nervous system, extending beyond the body and pulling the narrative toward an imaginary horizon that never arrives.

When Marty slingshots it back to New York, the film shifts gears from propulsion to fallout, and the pressure begins to be redistributed onto every idiot still standing nearby. Rachel’s (Odessa Azian) pregnancy elicits a fantasy of endless postponements by demanding results in calendar form, while Marty’s favorite improvisation disguised as ingenuity turns into a series of increasingly deranged schemes involving a kidnapped dog, an increasingly irritable gangster, suburban bowling alleys, and the systematic liquidation of faith. Safdie resists escalation for its own sake, choosing instead to reveal each disaster as a logical response to the last, which gives the chaos a strange coherence, even if the trajectory clearly bends toward collapse. Nothing seems haphazard here – everything seems calculated in the most dangerous way possible.

Chalamet makes this lineage legible by denying any glimpse of interiority. Marty doesn’t stop to think because thinking would slow him down, so the performance is based only on hunger, rather than reflection. When insults become cover charges for continued motions, Marty pays immediately and without receipt, treating dignity as a liquid asset intended to be spent, replenished, and spent again. What makes the performance sting is how casually he carries out this exchange, as if turning self-respect into forward motion were just another cost of doing business in a world that keeps rewarding the tallest man in the room until the bill is paid.

Criticism of the Safdie brothers has simply described their films as “tense” or “anxiety-inducing” rather than asking what the stress is actually doing, and Marty Supreme The poverty of that shorthand makes it impossible to ignore. running through connective tissue good time Through uncut gems And this film has little to do with nerves and everything to do with exposure, as Josh Safdie returns to capitalism as a system that demands ritualized humiliation before even offering the illusion of mobility. Marty’s life becomes a course of necessary humiliations, each one designed as a fair toll for continued participation, whether that toll comes in the form of fines, sanctions, public peddling on the buttocks, or the gradual erosion of everyone who believed in him.

A scene from ‘Marty Supreme’ Photo Credit: A24

Marty Mauser embodies a uniquely American fantasy in which destiny turns into a personal branding exercise, and Safdie clearly has fun turning that fantasy into parody. His steadfast belief that greatness is his own making feels strangely current, especially when paired with the image of orange table-tennis balls printed with his name and patriotic promise, as it reflects the way American power aestheticized itself as a product. Watching Marty run across borders boasting about his exceptionalism, it’s hard to think of another orange symbol of the American Dream™ ping-ponging across the country based on unabashed masculinity and aggressively mercurial fascist enthusiasm.

Safdie slides one of the sharpest knives of the film sideways, incorporating Holocaust “honey,” which presents historical violence as a thick, marketable, and endless swindle when you know how to sell it. The metaphor comes to a head when Marty tricks his ex-rival and Auschwitz survivor into casually invoking his inherited affliction in order to gain access to a certain shark (which unfortunately features prominently in the film). Marty never makes this system explicit, yet he intuitively benefits from it, which is perfect, because Safdie is pointing out how historical trauma becomes an endlessly renewable resource that can justify just about anything, which certainly rings a bell. especially The well-worn state-level playbook.

it’s hard to see Marty Supreme Without realizing it, Timothée Chalamet had been practicing for this role long before the cameras even came up, especially when you remember his unapologetic declaration of greatness at the SAG Awards last year. The arrogance of that moment seems, in retrospect, to be a very public place in method acting, because the hunger he displayed there became the driving force of his performance here. Chalamet plays Marty with a shameless thirst that seems at once exhausting and magnetic, and his willingness to show ambition corrupting works to the film’s advantage. As much as it pains me to admit it, watching an insufferable white boy channel the pathology of an even more insufferable white boy produces some undeniable consequences, as Chalamet ultimately aligns his search for validation with a character designed to interrogate him.

May your paddle break, Timmy Tim.

Marty Supreme is currently playing in theaters

published – January 23, 2026 05:30 PM IST