Marty Supreme: Chalamet acts up a storm

Luca Fontana

10.3.2026

Translation: Katherine Martin

Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme isn’t a sports film. It’s a fever dream, a Ping-Pong match, a tragicomedy – and with Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, it’s one of the best films of the year.

Don’t worry, this review contains zero spoilers. I won’t be revealing anything you haven’t already seen in trailers. Marty Supreme’s been showing in cinemas since 26 February.

Sometimes, I think I’ve got a film sussed out before it even starts. The pattern’s always the same, isn’t it? The main character fails, picks themselves up, trains and triumphs. And hey presto, you’ve got a classic sports film. Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie previously proved with Uncut Gems – a film he worked on with his brother Benny – that he takes pleasure in both ignoring and destroying these genre pigeonholes. Now, he’s pulled off that very same feat again.

And he’s done so with an energy that stuck with me for days after seeing the film.

What’s Marty Supreme about?

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a Jewish shoe salesman in early 1950s New York. He may sleep in his shoe store and accumulate debts the way other people accumulate business cards, but he carries the unshakeable conviction that he’s the best table tennis player in the world. And the crazy thing is, he might be right. Almost right, anyway.

The film starts off with the promise of a classic underdog story. Marty travels to the British Open, prances his way into the final with show-stopping moves and trick shots and comes face to face with his nemesis, Japanese player Koto Endo. Endo plays with a penhold racket sporting a rubber surface – a revolution in table tennis at the time, when wooden-surfaced rackets were still predominantly used. The racket allows Endo to create a spin that Marty’s simply never encountered before.

As a result, he loses, becomes known in Japan as «the defeated American» and Endo winds up a national hero. Marty travels back to New York, broke, humiliated and with the news of an unwanted pregnancy weighing on him. As if that isn’t enough, the table tennis association have slapped him with a hefty fine for his outbursts during the final. He now only has a week left to settle his debts, pay his fines and buy a plane ticket to Japan. With the World Table Tennis Championships taking place there, he’s keen to get revenge on his new arch-enemy.

Anything but a sports film

After this prologue, you’re expecting Rocky-style montages. Or a wise trainer who’ll build our hero back up when he hits rock bottom. A new racket, a new ball, a comeback, a battle, a triumph. What you get instead is something completely different – and much more exciting. The miserable, gloriously schizophrenic life of Marty Mauser.

It’s in this moment that Safdie stops shooting a sports film, and starts making one loosely based on US table tennis legend Marty Reisman – the fictitious Marty Mauser being his alter ego. Each stage of Marty’s life is dramatised in a way that makes it feel like a Ping-Pong match. Every time he scores a point (a little deal working out, an investor showing interest, a woman falling for his charm), the opposing side immediately scores two. A bathtub falling through the ceiling. The Mafia. An exposed lie. The script, penned by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, never gives Marty a moment’s peace.

And the camera, guided by Darius Khondji, a legend in the field known for Se7en, Mickey 17 and The Immigrant, shakes and trembles like it’s struggling to keep up. It’s as if the entire aesthetic language of the film pulsates to the rhythm of this man, rushing through his own life like a match he absolutely can’t lose.

The result? A film that feels like a fever dream. Fast, confused, occasionally hard to stomach, but impossible to look away from. Safdie’s decision to shoot a film about the 50s, in the restless visual style of the 70s, set to an 80s soundtrack, isn’t at all contradictory. It’s a precise statement. Marty Mauser is a man who doesn’t belong anywhere, who always seems a little outside of his time. A man who despite this – or precisely because of it – has a power you can’t escape.

The charisma of the creep

The driving factor behind this is Timothée Chalamet, who’s next-level in this role. He plays a man you’re not supposed to like. Let’s face it, Marty’s a gross narcissist with an ego as big as the Statue of Liberty. He lies, cheats and shamelessly exploits people.

He sleeps with the wife of a potential investor, all while negotiating business deals with the very same guy, gets his married girlfriend pregnant, then wrecks his best friend’s car while searching for the dog he was supposed to take to the vet.

Even so – and this is the incredible thing about Chalamet’s performance – he’s the most captivating person in every room he steps into. Chalamet plays Marty with a charisma and a sort of high tension that’s second to none. Every scene that involves him talking his way into a hole or sniffing around for his next deal feels like a powder keg on the verge of exploding at any moment.

Most of the time, it does.

None of this is pulled out of thin air. As we’ve covered, Marty Mauser’s loosely based on Marty «The Needle» Reisman. A man who enjoyed huge table tennis success, but was also known for his tricky, hustler mentality, his showmanship and his early defeat to a Japanese penhold player. That said, Marty Supreme isn’t a biopic. The film’s too extreme and wacky for that. Even so, the parallels and aesthetic references are unmistakable.

Seven years for the perfect serve

While we’re on the topic of visuals, as someone who plays table tennis, I was fascinated by how seriously the film takes the sport. The matches at the British Open are filmed like 1950s broadcasts, with static camera positions and no hectic editing – just the ball bouncing back and forth. The style of play is accurate too, with no rubber coating on the rackets, no modern topspin, and no athletic theatrics like you see these days.

This is no coincidence. Chalamet trained for the role for around seven years, even playing on tables in the desert, in Budapest and in Abu Dhabi while he was filming Dune.

Since the film’s set in the 50s, he also had to unlearn contemporary playing techniques, making use of celebrity support to do so. None other than German table tennis star Timo Boll helped him choreograph and rehearse his Ping-Pong scenes. When even that wasn’t enough, Safdie helped him over the finish line with CGI. After all, he knew exactly what he wanted and wouldn’t compromise.

The fact that Boll himself has a brief cameo in the film as one of Marty’s opponents was the icing on the cake for a table tennis lover like me.

Luca Fontana

Senior Editor

Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.ch

I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.

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