A couple of years ago, people started speaking of Timothée Chalamet and other male actors as “rodent men,” with their prominent teeth and messy hair. I don’t know how some of those other actors might have felt about that, but Chalamet seems to have leaned into it, because in Marty Supreme, he plays a guy whose nickname is “Mouse.”
The plot of the movie (in which Chalamet portrays a table-tennis champion) may sound like one of Wes Anderson’s jags, but in fact it is by Josh Safdie. Like Uncut Gems, the previous film Safdie made with his brother, it’s a breakneck, sports-oriented thriller about a Jewish man who hustles all the time because his life depends on it. Due respect to the fans of Uncut Gems, this is the better movie.
Chalamet portrays Marty Mauser, a New Yorker who’s in London in 1952 competing in the British Open of table tennis. Despite a lack of backing from the U.S. table tennis association, he blows through the field until he reaches the finals, where a deaf Japanese player (Koto Kawaguchi) playing with a paddle of his own design not only defeats Marty but humiliates him. Wouldn’t you know it? The next chance Marty has to redeem himself is at the world championships in Tokyo, where his newfound nemesis will have the hometown crowd backing him.
If you are looking for a nice Jewish boy to root for, look elsewhere. Marty is an insufferable prick who showboats during his matches and throws money around because he’s so sure that he’s going to win riches. When preparing to face an older player (Géza Röhrig) who survived the Nazi concentration camps, Marty tells the press, “I’ll do to him what Auschwitz couldn’t.” He beds a Hollywood star (Gwyneth Paltrow) at the same time that he’s trying to strike a sponsorship deal with her manufacturer husband (Kevin O’Leary).
While it’s fair enough when Marty uses one of his trophies to bash in the face of a wife-beating neighbor (Emory Cohen), elsewhere he is self-confident to the point of recklessness, as when he crashes a rehearsal of the movie star’s Broadway play and casually destroys her Method actor co-star (Fred Hechinger). Chalamet makes that quality electrifying and dangerous, like he did not in The French Dispatch and A Complete Unknown.
Safdie partners him well by putting him in set pieces that give us no time to catch our breath. Marty spends the entire film in dire need of cash, so he and a cabdriver friend (Tyler, the Creator) find themselves a bowling alley in New Jersey that has a ping-pong table and use it to hustle everybody in the venue out of their spare cash. Just as they seem to have made out like bandits, an angry mob catches up with them after figuring out their scam and tries to kill them both. In escaping, they lose a dog belonging to a Jersey mobster (Abel Ferrara), and when Marty and his pregnant girlfriend (Odessa A’zion) try to return the dog for a financial reward, it results in a shootout that leaves several people dead.
While the story is set in the 1950s, composer Daniel Lopatin a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never gives the film a synth-heavy score and Safdie frequently drops the needle on 1980s rock songs, as in a montage where Marty performs in a variety of circus acts that’s set to The Korgis’ “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime.”
His creativity extends to the casting, too, and not just with the rapper Tyler and the longtime indie film director Ferrara. Fran Drescher delivers an unusually restrained performance as Marty’s worried mother, travel writer Pico Iyer portrays the table-tennis honcho who tries to blackball Marty, and NBA Hall of Famer George Gervin plays the owner of an underground table-tennis club where Marty goes to practice. Amid all this, A’zion (who can also be seen on TV’s I Love LA) pilfers her scenes as an unglamorous Jewish girl who realizes that Mouse has other things on his mind and determines to provide for her baby herself.
Mouse does tell her straight out that he has been given a great talent and it’s his duty to get the most out of it. The fact that his talent is for something that most of the people around him don’t take seriously helps dry out the movie and keep it from becoming too heavy. Yet Marty Supreme doesn’t resolve with his rematch against the Japanese champion (which is filmed with terrific zest anyway). Rather, it comes when he returns to New York, first sees his child, and breaks down into a flood of tears at the notion that he now has something else to focus on. It’s here that the movie and Chalamet’s performance both reach true greatness among 2025’s best cinematic achievements.
Marty Supreme
Starring Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow. Written and directed by Josh Safdie. Rated R.
