Best known for his collaborations with brother Benny on Uncut Gems and Good Time, Josh Safdie steps out on his own with Marty Supreme, a sports-inflected (ping pong!) character study that shifts his familiar obsessions into a midcentury setting. The film trades contemporary New York anxiety for a 1950s backdrop, but retains Safdie’s fascination with the psychic toll of ambition.
Timothee Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a brash hustler and table tennis prodigy navigating the smoky clubs and underground tournaments of postwar New York. The character is loosely inspired by real-life ping-pong legend Marty Reisman, though the film avoids the structure of a traditional biopic. Instead, Marty Supreme treats its protagonist as a kind of American invention—part athlete, part showman—driven less by love of the game than by a desire to dominate a world that barely acknowledges the sport’s legitimacy.
Safdie stages competitive table tennis with his usual penchant for intensity, rendering matches as high-stakes psychological duels. The film’s focus is on Marty’s momentum and his need to keep moving, keep betting, keep winning, even as his life grows increasingly unstable. As in Safdie’s earlier work, success is never clean, and consequences accumulate faster than reflection.
The supporting cast brings both glamour and friction. Gwyneth Paltrow appears as a retired movie star whose relationship with Marty offers intimacy alongside emotional volatility. Fran Drescher plays a sharp-edged supporting role, while musicians and filmmakers—including Tyler, The Creator and Abel Ferrara—populate the film’s margins, giving the world a slightly surreal, downtown-adjacent texture. (The film’s mood of gritty, urban propulsion owe’s more than a small debt to Ferrara’s movies King of New York and Bad Lieutenant.)
Safdie co-wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, and the partnership shows in the film’s restless construction. Scenes often unfold at a clipped pace, overlapping dialogue and movement, with little interest in smoothing transitions. Though the period setting is carefully realized, the film avoids nostalgia, favoring friction over polish.
Produced and distributed by A24, Marty Supreme premiered at the New York Film Festival in October and opens theatrically on December 25 at Upstate Films locations in Rhinebeck, Saugerties, and Kingston; the Moviehouse in Millerton; Story Screen in Hudson; and the Crandell Theatre in Chatham.
