There is something perversely admirable about a person who refuses to apologize for talent and looks at the ordinary life laid out before him and recoils as if being asked to settle for a lesser version of himself. Timothée Chalamet, whose recent run of performances is steadily restoring my faith in the future of the Hollywood movie star, leans fully into that impulse in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. He rejects stability and strives for greatness with such conviction that it resembles destiny.
Chalamet portrays Marty Mauser, a Jewish New Yorker in the 1950s determined to become the greatest table tennis player in the world and to popularize the then-incipient sport in America along the way. The title’s “Supreme” is an allusion to Mauser’s inflated sense of self. He is brimming with certainty, convinced the world is merely lagging behind his inevitable ascent. Chalamet disappears into the role with coiled intensity: abrasive, uncouth, socially graceless, yet magnetic all the same. Marty is the sort of person you instinctively avoid in real life (his every interaction feels like the prelude to a hustle), and yet he commands attention. You root for him not because he is virtuous, but because his willpower is impossible to ignore.
From the opening moments, Marty’s discomfort with steady work is unmistakable. Employed at his uncle’s shoe store, he treats the job as an inconvenience, something beneath a man who already regards himself as a future world champion. Restless, hyperverbal, and always scanning for angles, he proves a natural salesman, promoted to manager against his own wishes, though the role serves only as a means to an end.
Chalamet brings a kinetic confidence to the role reminiscent of Tom Cruise in the 1980s, when ambition itself functioned as a form of theater. Marty is a hustler by instinct, and Safdie stages his cons accordingly. One of the film’s standout sequences finds Marty and a friend working a room of unsuspecting ping pong players at a grimy bowling alley, slowly inflating the betting pool before vanishing with everyone’s cash. The scene carries the pleasure of watching a professional operate at peak form, recalling the sharkish bravado of Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986).
What gives Marty Supreme its shape is the distance between the life Marty could live and the one he insists on pursuing. His uncle offers him comfort, security, and eventual ownership of the business. Marty responds by making his own life deliberately harder — stealing from the company safe to fund a flight to a tournament in a sport few Americans even recognize. Money, for Marty, is incidental. He spends freely when it suits the image he has constructed of himself, barking at a waiter that he wants the beef Wellington and the caviar tasting plate simply because they are the most expensive items on the menu. The act is theatrical rather than indulgent, another prop in the fantasy of supremacy he is already inhabiting.
Much of the film follows Marty’s improvised and turbulent path toward Tokyo, where he hopes to compete in the world championship and face the Japanese champion who handed him his first defeat early on. Marty’s ambition is relentless, yet his self-assurance borders on delusion. In one scene, he tells a potential financial backer that he is “uniquely positioned to become the face of table tennis in America.”
Formally, the film carries the same breathless urgency as Safdie’s Uncut Gems (2019), though the obsession at its center operates differently. Marty shares Howard Ratner’s compulsion and volatility, but his fixation is aimed at mastery rather than the blind hope of beating the odds. As an individual sport, table tennis offers a measurable arena in which talent, discipline, and nerve decide outcomes. That distinction shapes Marty’s ambition and makes his journey easier to follow than that of a degenerate gambler’s, even when his behavior is equally destructive.
Safdie surrounds Chalamet with a strong supporting cast. Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary is unexpectedly effective as Milton Rockwell, a blunt, affluent businessman whom Marty both charms and repels with his confidence. Gwyneth Paltrow brings a worn, brittle elegance to Rockwell’s wife, a washed-up actress watching Marty construct the mythology she has already outlived. Odessa A’zion is particularly strong as Rachel Mizler, Marty’s pregnant lover, whose manipulative attempts to tether him to responsibility further escalate the already palpable tension in the film.
At one point, Marty is asked what he plans to do if his dream fails to materialize. He rejects the premise outright, retorting, “That thought doesn’t even enter my consciousness.”
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Watching him calls to mind elite tennis players such as Roger Federer, and what makes their matches so engrossing: the willingness to fight for every point with total commitment, sprinting and straining across the court until every possibility is exhausted. Marty applies that same ferocity to everything. His life is chaotic, improvised, and frequently reckless, yet organized around a single axis: winning the world championship and being crowned the greatest table tennis player in the world. He pivots from one charade to the next with captivating alacrity, all in service of that pursuit.
Marty Supreme is one of my favorite films of 2025. It sketches a cautionary vision of how blind ambition erodes family, intimacy, and moral restraint, reducing even adultery and thievery to afterthoughts. Yet it also acknowledges the role such ambitious figures play in driving progress. Marty’s recklessness and excess are inseparable from the momentum that propels him forward. He pushes boundaries precisely because he ignores the guardrails on which others rely. The film’s final clarity is stark: Belief, once absolute, can become an unstoppable, supreme force.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.