Some films you watch, and some films you sit with—and Marty Supreme, projected on the screen of the Chinese Theatre, is emphatically the latter. Loud, jittery, often exhausting and, in a way that becomes more and more disconcerting the more you sit with it, strangely moving, the film is less a sports drama than a psychological study of obsession, ambition and the American need to be someone, at any cost. As such, it plays like a fever dream of postwar masculinity, filtered through mythmaking and millennial irony and anchored by a performance from Timothée Chalamet that is abrasive and magnetic and uncomfortably, deeply intimate.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
“Marty Supreme isn’t a sports movie—it’s a two-and-a-half-hour adrenaline spike about the terror and seduction of believing you’re destined for greatness.” The Hollywoodland Revue
The conception of the film was always larger than life. While inspired in part by the real-life hustler turned table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, who went from the New York pool halls to the national championship, Marty Supreme was never intended to be a traditional biopic. The character was informed by Reisman's swagger, abrasiveness and outsider toughness, but his name, most events and many of his relationships are the product of pure invention. This isn't history—it's folklore, bigger and more pointed than real life. You never know where the truth leaves off and embellishment begins, and that ambiguity is part of the plan.
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser as a hustling ping-pong prodigy whose manic pursuit of greatness blurs the line between ambition and delusion. He is not a character you easily like, or root for, or even understand—and yet you do. Chalamet’s Marty is volatile and selfish, needy and cruel, driven by a wild belief that greatness is something you grab for with both hands before the world gets the chance to slap it out of reach. He never really gives you a sense that he is safe. There is always the feeling that violence, or humiliation, or just plain ruin is right around the corner. That Marty will be beaten up or arrested or left stranded and abandoned or bled dry. The remarkable trick of the film is that none of this quite comes to pass, and yet the anxiety never fully dissipates. You find yourself waiting for a fall that never quite arrives.
Director Josh Safdie infuses the material with his trademark feeling of psychic and formal combustion, forcing scenes until they seem like they might burst. Safdie approaches table tennis like a subterranean combat sport, a theater of ego, a contest of existences. Faces are crowded by the camera, sweat and nerves linger. We’re denied the reassuring signifiers of the sports story; no elegant moment of victory here, just a glide towards the next fight.
The cast is idiosyncratic, unexpected, and miraculously well chosen. Odessa A’zion is superb as Rachel, Marty’s lover and something more thorny than a muse or a partner in crime. She has the most screen time after Chalamet and deploys it to great effect, leavening the film’s madness with smarts and emotional precision. Rachel doesn’t so much stabilize the film as reflect Marty’s appetites back to him and dare him to explain them.
One of the movie's more surprising touches is from Gwyneth Paltrow as Kay Stone, a former 1930s movie star, a little faded around the edges, with an instinct for intrigue that provides an ironic Hollywood echo for the action. I'm not a Paltrow fan in the usual, but here she is completely effective, understated, canny and sure of herself. Paltrow is also looking good in the maturity department, a silent gravity to her performance that suggests a woman who's already been through the Marty-jonesian fame thing and lived to tell about it.
Appearing in brief, unrecognizable supporting roles are Fran Drescher as Marty's mother and Sandra Bernhard, who also makes a swift, scathing appearance. In another missed-in-a-glance metamorphosis, magician Penn Jillette pops up for a legitimately creepy, almost "see if you can spot me" scene. To complete this project's list of quirky casting decisions, entrepreneur and Shark Tank personality Kevin O'Leary gives an awkwardly sinister performance as Kay Stone's husband with a stiff, chilling effectiveness that feels deliberately out of place—and therefore exactly right.
The main problem with the film for me is its running time. Marty Supreme is edging on two and a half hours and suffers from this modern misconception that to be serious is to be prolix. The fact that all the nervousness, all the argumentative posturing, and all the escalations take place over and over again, does not make them more meaningful; eventually they just become tedious. Why do so many modern films have to be so long?
Much of the advance publicity was, of course, about the infamous spanking scene (reportedly involving twenty actual smacks with a ping-pong paddle, though only six made the final cut, after extensive rehearsals). It's hard to deny the raw provocation, the intentionally uncomfortable viscerality, the likelihood that it will be endlessly discussed. It also, importantly, is a perfect distillation of the film's ethos: humiliation as spectacle, endurance as currency, the body itself as collateral in the pursuit of dominance. Yes, it is eroticized, sensationalized, played for shock. But it is also revelatory of how far Marty will go to make himself worthy of notice. And yes, the audience will recognize the "peach."
The film's critical response has been predictably similar to the experience of watching it: Wonderment at its nerve and performances, irritation at its indulgences and self-obsession, and intrigue at its pointed refusal to offer clean catharsis. Some will view it as a mess; some as a masterpiece of controlled chaos. The public response is likely to be similarly split, though Chalamet's performance alone will ensure the film is much talked about, quoted, and picked over for some time.
Awards talk feels inevitable. Best Picture and Best Actor nominations seem almost assured, with strong possibilities in technical categories as well. Best Director remains less certain, given the film’s excesses. Supporting acting nominations may follow, particularly for A’zion and possibly Paltrow, though the competition will be fierce.
Marty Supreme is not about table tennis, nor even about Marty Reisman in any literal sense. It is about the mythology of self-invention, the American romance with hustlers, and the psychic toll of believing—against all evidence—that you are destined to be extraordinary. Watching it unfold on the Chinese Theatre’s screen, one feels both exhilarated and battered, which may be precisely the point.
This is a film that dares you to keep up with it, dares you to like its hero, and dares you to decide whether ambition itself is a virtue or a sickness. Either way, it’s not easily forgotten—and that, for better or worse, makes it a winner.
If you’ve seen Marty Supreme, I’d love to hear your take—did it exhilarate you, exhaust you, or unsettle you in unexpected ways? Share your observations, disagreements, and favorite moments in the comments below and join the conversation.
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