On the day of the film's release, Dami Angela Akinniranye attended a busy screening in Cineworld. There, the packed audience was engaged, laughing and wincing, fully caught up in Marty Supreme’s spiralling journey.
In 2020, filmmaker Josh Safdie was gifted Marty Reisman’s 1974 memoir The Money Player; the Confessions of America's Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler by his wife, Sara Rossein. Six years later, we are gifted with 150 minutes of dark, ping pong-fuelled drama, performed by a star-studded cast.
Marty Supreme is set in the 1950s in New York, and is loosely based on the life of the table tennis player Marty Reisman, although not strictly a true story. This fictionalised version follows the toxic ambition of a man with just a couple of days to raise a serious amount of money. Marty Supreme, AKA Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), is cocky, compulsive and spends every waking moment in pursuit of greatness, even as that pursuit corrodes almost everything around him. He’s desperately trying to fund his trip to Tokyo for a ping pong tournament.
Around Marty, his childhood friend and secret lover (Odessa A’zion) reframes the stakes, her future on the line. She’s just one of the several strained relationships Marty attempts to manage over the course of the film, including his over-involved uncle, Murray Norkin (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), his mother (Fran Drescher), the police and, of course, criminal elements.
Marty’s story reflects the hyper-individualism hustle post-war, in which personal success trumps community. The plot keeps circling back to money: who you are willing to manipulate in pursuit of it; how the idealistic passion of a dream is dampened by real-life complexities and financial barriers; how quickly money becomes the only thing that matters; how easily it bends ambition out of shape.
Visually, this film is powered by set design and camera movement that behaves almost like another character. The locations are heightened but recognisable, somewhere between New York City grit and music video fantasy. Neon edges, cramped corridors and cluttered flats serve as a commentary on class and aspiration. The camera never sits still, tracking and circling the tables with a kinetic energy that mirrors Marty’s own frantic mindset. In this world, the sport isn’t a niche oddity, rather fast-paced, buzzy and oddly aspirational.
Timothée Chalamet, also serving as a producer, anchors both the film and its promotional push with a focused, driven performance that treats ping pong with absolute seriousness. In an interview with Ebro Darden, Safdie spoke about beginning the production process more than six years ago, and that long preparation is evident in the choreography and precision of each match. For Safdie, Marty Supreme continues his signature focus on ambition and moral tension seen in Uncut Gems.
Right now, a piece of cinema like this feels designed to provoke as much as to excite. Adrenaline laces this discomforting look at what happens when obsession, money and national narratives clash.
Marty Supreme is in cinemas now.
