Watching Someone Fail Shouldn’t Be So Fun

Marty Mauser cannot stop the hustle. In Marty Supreme’s electrifying opening moments, the audience is introduced to the wiry 20-something (played by Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York. He’s working as a shoe salesman, talking a fussy older customer into buying a fancier brand with easy confidence. Almost immediately thereafter, we learn that his boss (who happens to be his uncle) wants to make him the store manager. But Marty, a working-class Jewish kid, won’t hear of it. He has a singular career goal—to become the world’s best-known table-tennis player. His athletic ideal hasn’t exactly focused him, however: He walks right out of his uncle’s office and into a storage closet with another supposed customer—really his close friend, Rachel (Odessa A’zion)—to make passionate love.

Marty is vivacious, and the film around him is buzzing at the same frequency: itchy, anxious, yet unbearably exciting throughout, each minute defined by some hairpin plot turn. Not long after that raucous first scene, he arrives in London, where he prepares to compete in a global Ping-Pong tournament while complaining about the shoddy hospitality. Like his previous movies—most of them directed in collaboration with his brother, Benny—the filmmaker Josh Safdie makes what soon becomes a high-stress journey palatable by setting off with an exhilarating level of momentum. Though the film is a hefty 150 minutes, it operates at a careening pace, barreling from twist to twist. The audience is kept handcuffed to a protagonist who’s possessed by undeniable skill and moxie, but simply can’t get out of his own way.

Marty Supreme is Safdie’s first solo effort since splitting with Benny; their last work together was the fractious, nervy hit Uncut Gems. Benny also directed a sports drama this year on his own: The Smashing Machine, a much more muted effort that swerved from the Safdies’ jittery style. Marty Supreme indicates that Josh may have been the chief engineer of that approach, as evidenced by both the movie’s style and its story. The first act does the important work of establishing Marty’s desire for sports superstardom as well as his penchant for getting himself into ridiculous entanglements. The film initially seems like a familiar sports story: Loosely inspired by the real-life table-tennis player Marty Reisman, the tale follows an underdog rising through the ranks and brushing up against immortality. But Safdie, as always, seeks to challenge convention. Marty’s attempt to break out of postwar poverty, for example, feels modern; it’s even set to a pulsing soundtrack full of ’80s–New Wave hits.

[Read: Only Timothée Chalamet could get away with this]

Marty Supreme’s ensemble is similarly colorful. During his odyssey around the world, Marty encounters an array of other frenzied creatures: There’s Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank’s own Kevin O’Leary), a cruel businessman who wants to bankroll Marty; Milton’s wife, Kay Stone (a magnificently frosty Gwyneth Paltrow), an actor with whom Marty pursues an affair; and Ezra Mishkin (the director Abel Ferrara), a scuzzy figure whom Marty accidentally double-crosses. He makes friends, too, including the Ping-Pong-playing cab driver Wally (Tyler Okonma), who helps his pal with a moneymaking scheme. Marty’s mentor, Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig), is a former table-tennis champion who gently tries to dissuade his protégé from chasing his overblown goal. But everyone in this movie, rich or poor, seems to be on the edge of polite society, working their own angle while our hero strives for greatness.

In the hands of a lesser actor, Marty’s difficult personality might make him tough to root for. But he so perfectly matches Chalamet’s spirited, try-hard charisma—the same presence that made him a comfortable fit playing such varied roles as the fanciful Willy Wonka, a renegade young Bob Dylan, and Dune’s super-powered mystic Paul Atreides. Even as Marty’s quest veers off course, Chalamet imbues the character with an irresistible passion. Marty isn’t getting mixed up with criminals and flirting with married actors on a self-destructive impulse, like Adam Sandler’s gambling addict in Uncut Gems or Robert Pattinson’s petty criminal in Good Time, another pulse-quickening Safdie-brothers production. Instead, the director portrays the nightmarish baggage that comes with fighting to achieve victory outside the mainstream.

Much like Marty himself, Marty Supreme conjures a sense of being on the outside looking in. The story unfolds on a Hollywood scale, with a huge budget and close attention to period detail, but Safdie has managed to keep the indie ethos that powered his prior successes. This is a movie that, among its other quirks, is laden with unusual performers—the playwright David Mamet; the retired basketball legend George Gervin; the magician Penn Jillette; and even the New York grocery magnate John Catsimatidis. As a holiday-viewing experience, Marty Supreme stands alone: Unlike the heroes of this season’s glitzy blockbusters, Marty is a superstar only in his own mind.