Review: Marty Supreme

There’s a particular voltage that runs through Timothée Chalamet’s best performances, a crackling mixture of boyish charm and near-messianic intensity that suggests a person convinced the world will bend to meet his momentum. Marty Supreme is the rare film that doesn’t just harness that electricity, it interrogates the wiring. Josh Safdie’s latest, a deliriously overclocked tale of ambition and self-invention, hands Chalamet a character so steeped in his own mythos that you can practically smell the solder from all the circuits overheating. And Chalamet, salesman-savant that he is, pitches this unraveling with an almost devotional zeal.

The setup is disarmingly simple, at least before it metastasizes into the narrative equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine lit by neon and poor decisions. Marty Mauser is a young Jewish kid convinced he’s destined to become the greatest ping-pong player to ever live. Why ping-pong? The movie shrugs, and so does Marty, as though the truth might puncture his ballooning sense of purpose. What does matter is the hunger: ravenous, erratic, and deeply, hilariously earnest. Safdie makes Marty’s obsession feel both absurd and elemental, like something inherited rather than chosen, a compulsion that runs deeper than talent or logic.

Safdie shoots post-war New York not as a period piece but as a fever-dream pressure cooker. The Lower East Side becomes a spiritual gauntlet for Marty’s ego, dense, combustible, full of characters so ludicrously vivid they could each anchor a short film. The director’s fondness for frenetic escalation remains intact, but here it’s cushioned by a surprising warmth. Where Uncut Gems charted the combustion of a man who thought risk was its own reward, Marty Supreme feels like the story of someone convinced that the world owes him transcendence.

Chalamet teeters on the knife-edge between swagger and delusion with thrilling control. His Marty is simultaneously a prodigy, a brat, a poet of self-promotion, and a child vibrating with cosmic insecurity. He is incapable of ending a fight without muttering a tiny, involuntary “I love you,” and equally incapable of noticing how often that muttering resembles a reflex rather than a feeling. It’s a performance so alive to contradiction that it practically folds in on itself. You can see the tragedy flickering in the wings even during the comedic high-wire sequences.

The film’s constellation of supporting players only deepens that tension. Gwyneth Paltrow, in a welcome return to the screen, brings a ghostly glamour to a faded Hollywood starlet who becomes Marty’s improbable confidante and unlikely mirror. Tyler Okonma’s turn as Marty’s best friend, Wally, is another standout. Nearly every performer, no matter how briefly they appear, gets stamped onto the film’s chaotic tapestry like a rogue trading card.

If Safdie’s earlier work felt like a descent, Marty Supreme is more interested in the dizzy pedestal Marty builds for himself. The film understands that ambition is its own narcotic, and that the American myth, of reinvention, of self-made triumph, can seduce even when its logic collapses under scrutiny. Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein tuck these ideas into the movie’s frantic bones, allowing the commentary to surface organically rather than sermonize.

By its final act, Marty Supreme has quietly, almost sneakily, accumulated real emotional heft. The film suggests that fulfillment and self-destruction can look disarmingly similar when you’re sprinting toward a dream too large to articulate. But it also extends something like grace to Marty, revealing that what looks like egomania may simply be terror wearing ambition as a disguise.

4.5/5