Manic ‘Marty Supreme’ Smashes the American Dream

Rooting for the underdog, on the field or in a movie, is one of America’s greatest traditions. You can trace it all the way back to our time-honored, tea-stained origin story of a ragtag band of farmers and shopkeepers taking on the British Empire.

Marty Supreme (opening Dec. 25), Josh Safdie’s beautifully crafted runaway train with an astonishing Timothée Chalamet as its pedal-to-the-metal engineer, turns the basic underdog dynamic, with all its brio and bravery and desperation and bullshit, into a feverish exposé of the fury and folly of the American Dream. If that isn’t your cup of mead, friend, what kind of patriot are you?

Josh Safdie’s best films (Uncut Gems and Good Time, co-directed with his brother Bennie, who also directed a sports movie on his own this year, The Smashing Machine) center on men who know only one direction (forward) and one speed (faster). Are those protagonists (played by Adam Sandler and Robert Pattinson) and Marty running toward something or away from something? It’s a trick question, of course.

Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is inspired by the late Marty Reisman, who titled his (ghostwritten) 1974 autobiography The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler. But we have no clue this skinny kid is an athlete when we are introduced to him in the early 1950s. He’s conning a customer in his uncle’s Lower East Side shoe store into buying the too-tight pair he’s passing off as her size.

She’s too savvy to fall for Marty’s spiel — much of the tension in Marty Supreme derives from whether people will fold or stiffen in the face of his high-speed verbal onslaughts — but she’s instantly displaced by the arrival of a young woman who has some urgent footwear business with Marty that takes them downstairs to the storeroom.

Marty Supreme’s early scenes, set in confined spaces, convey the claustrophobia driving its namesake to exceed the world’s expectations and escape the crummy, anonymous life everyone around him seems fated to. But we aren’t prepared for Marty’s lunatic ambition, and his off-putting brand of American exceptionalism in which he effortlessly shifts from hero to victim to suit his schemes.

We are both charmed by and leery of this showman, gambler and flamboyant self-promoter who, we come to see, is indifferent to the damage he leaves in his wake. If Marty is a kind of forerunner for larger-than-life competitors like Muhammad Ali, Evel Knievel, Pete Rose and John McEnroe, he’s also cut from the same cloth as the “pal” who borrowed your car and lied about the scratches and dents.

Most filmmakers would be content to highlight the working-class desolation of Marty’s milieu, and let the high-stakes drama of far-flung table-tennis tournaments and New Jersey bowling alley scams rivet the viewer. Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein bravely go further, repeatedly reminding us of Marty’s Jewishness in ways that are edgy and shocking.

In one scene, Marty cajoles fellow player Béla (Hungarian actor Géza Rohrig of the shattering 2015 concentration-camp saga Son of Saul) to reveal the tattooed numbers on his arm to a stranger. Later, on a trip to the Middle East, Marty shamelessly chips off a piece from a pyramid that he gifts to his mother with the line, “We built it.”

It isn’t enough for Marty to make some money, get his picture in the papers and travel abroad. Nor is it enough to capture the attention of a one-time movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow) with a rich husband. Sadly, he isn’t satisfied with success.

If I were a lousy psychotherapist, I might see Marty Supreme as a Holocaust-revenge movie. Marty’s taking (back) what’s his (or what he sees as the Jewish people’s). The problem with that interpretation is that Marty directs his white-hot frenzy at anyone in his path, including erstwhile friends and supporters. He combines the ambition of Duddy Kravitz, the zero-to-60 acceleration of the Roadrunner and the relentlessness of the Terminator with their accompanying lack of scruples.

Marty Supreme is far and away one of the best movies of 2025, and its brilliant execution extends to the way it guides your feelings toward its anti-hero. There comes a point, sooner or later, where you will stop taking Marty’s side. You may even hope for his comeuppance, as I did. And then there’s a turn where Safdie and Chalamet will likely make you root for Marty again.

American movies typically encourage us to cheer for the underdog. Marty Supreme makes you question that simple loyalty, and ponder how much a child of immigrants who seeks to prove that the streets are paved with gold is allowed to get away with.