Marty Supreme: Timothée Chalamet is perfect as a bratty ping pong hustler

Josh Safdie’s headlong new film opens on backtalk in a drab New York shoe store circa 1952, segues to a storeroom tryst, then drops the opening credits over science footage of speeding spermatozoa. The cheeky image declares life as a constant hustle for the film’s dubious hero, Marty Mauser – a brash would-be ping pong legend with his eyes on the prize. In many ways it’s a classic tale of the never-say-die American striver, told in the streetwise, careening Safdie manner, laced with humour (both brash and cartoonish) with rug-pulling disaster looming round every corner.

It’s also an evolving story of loves and loyalties and getting beyond your own ego – but before Marty (Timothée Chalamet) comes anywhere close to self-knowledge, he’s busy buzzing his way into competitive ping-pong with talent and chutzpah. Loosely based on actual ping-pong champion Marty Reisman, Chalamet’s wiry youngblood with the sleazebag moustache is itching to walk out on his shoe-sale job and Lower East Side apartment. He’s sleeping with a (now pregnant) friend, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), wife of a lunkhead neighbour, but when he gets into a tournament in London, he not only talks his way into a suite at the Ritz, he also charms a screen icon, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), into bed – partly, it seems, just to see if he can. 

It probably doesn’t hurt that Marty gets the satisfaction of cuckolding Kay’s husband, bigoted pen magnate Milton (Kevin O’Leary, of the entrepreneur reality TV show Shark Tank). Part of Marty Supreme’s engine is its protagonist’s hunger for recognition, whatever form it takes, for mastering what he regards as the art of ping pong. He does have steadfast friends, like Hungarian ex-champ Bela Kletzki (Geza Rohrig of László Nemes’s 2015 film Son of Saul), who – when a pro-circuit bid falters – joins him on a Harlem Globetrotter-style trick/stunt international tour (e.g., playing against a sea lion). Wally (Tyler Okonma, aka the musician Tyler, the Creator), an old pal who drives a taxi, keeps saving Marty’s skin in the antic pile-up of scraps and half-baked schemes that propel the middle of the film and nearly land Marty in jail.

Marty’s hustler instinct keeps threatening to divert him from ping pong glory, never more so than in a cartoonish-turned-sinister subplot around Abel Ferrara as a gangster-ish oldster with a beloved dog. Safdie and co-writer Ronnie Bronstein’s zeal for the gonzo sidewalk-tabloid New York gallery of street characters remains undiminished. That’s exemplified by the casting of Ferrara and local figures like John Catsimatidis, owner of a supermarket chain and one-time mayoral candidate, here playing the rich dad of Marty’s faithful friend Dion (Luke Manley) – left holding the bag on a business deal involving orange ping pong balls dubbed Marty Supreme. Filmed partly around the Lower East Side (including a glimpse of a delivery truck for the historic LES Jewish publication The Forward) Marty Supreme gets just as much authenticity out of the Safdie-Bronstein feel for the constant negotiations of daily life, though Jack Fisk’s production design is characteristically fine (and unafraid to embrace the browns and greys of the 1950s).

Chalamet channels a kind of inner brat we haven’t seen so much from him lately, then nicely modulates with cracks-showing panic in the run-up to a climactic exhibition match in Japan with world champ Koto Endo (played by actual deaf champion Koto Kawaguchi). Up to and including that point, Marty keeps lobbing room-silencing comments (like referencing Auschwitz when trash-talking an opponent), and Chalamet makes for a perfect li’l stinker, challenging and taunting the world. Reining in his screen idol smile, he folds himself into Marty’s one-step-forward-two-steps-back quest for victory and respectability. Whilst shooting much of the actual ping-pong from a distance, Darius Khondji’s camera mirrors the energy of the plot but without straining for the trademark Safdie kineticism – it’s there in the character even when he’s handcuffed. 

Like a lot of prominent American cinema at the moment, Marty’s life feels like an all-or-nothing gambit for vindicating success or abject humiliation, but in Marty’s context, wresting glory from the jaws of an already brutal 20th century. Laced with anthemic 1980s pop and Daniel Lopatin’s sheets of synth, the two-and-a-half-hour film (and Chalamet) saves the biggest punch for the final moments, going all-in on the life event that could finally bring Marty down to earth. In some ways, it’s a notably traditional conclusion – Safdie has made his post-Brothers debut with a film about becoming a mad dad (rather than having a mad dad) – but one can easily imagine Marty leaping, moments later, into another dash for the next supreme victory. Older, but who’s to say wiser?

► Marty Supreme is in UK cinemas 26 December.