‘Marty Supreme’ review: The game of greatness

Timothée Chalamet and an all-star cast do outstanding work in Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s blistering ode to ambition.

Marty Supreme never stops moving, and not just in its adrenaline-fueled moments. Beneath the surface, everything hums with a restless vibration, making even the quietest scenes feel charged. The sound is too sharp, the colors too vivid, the tension too constant. Every frame pulses with life, a subtle tremor that keeps you unsteady, alert, and unable to look away.

Marty Supreme follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a scrappy 1950s New Yorker convinced he is destined to become a ping-pong legend. As he chases greatness, he races through bad decisions, competitions, and plenty of chaos. What results is a messy, awfully funny, and unexpectedly emotional sports comedy-drama.

Can you feel it?

Photo Credit: A24

The premise is deceptively simple: an athlete on the brink, a shot at greatness, a city that never gives anything without taking twice as much back. But the film operates like it’s anything but simple. It cranks the emotional dial to eleven, lets the soundtrack scream from the skyscraper-high rooftops, and still somehow finds pockets of tenderness tucked in between the chaos. What starts as a straightforward story mutates into a character study about pressure, ambition, and the cost of wanting something so badly it changes everything about your life.

If the film had leaned too hard into its mania, it could have collapsed under its own pulse. Instead, it sustains itself on sheer conviction — and a blistering performance from Chalamet. His Marty is all sinew and stubbornness, a live wire even when perfectly still. By the final sequence, Marty has reached his peak and with it, a raw, cathartic moment where there’s nowhere left to go but down. It’s Marty Mauser that has razed everything to the ground, yet in that ruin lies nothing but possibility. The emotional payoff lands with devastating inevitability, shaped by the unrelenting abrasiveness Chalamet has carried throughout the film.

The first major clue that Marty Supreme knows exactly what it’s doing comes early. Right after the opening scene, an iconic and outrageously funny sequence set to “Forever Young” perfectly foreshadows Marty’s brash, relentless character. And the film’s obsession with sound doesn’t stop there; the design is deliberately overwhelming, the auditory equivalent of a heart pounding in a too-small chest.

Living in the moment.

Photo Credit: A24

The film’s visual identity is remarkable. The production design becomes a character in its own right, pulsing with the weight and demands of the city on those trying to survive within it. Its 1950s New York feels alive with rain-slicked alleys, cigarette smoke curling through dimly lit halls, and narrow apartments that feel inhabited rather than staged.

And then there’s the ensemble: Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma (Tyler, the Creator), and Odessa A’zion. Each leaves a lasting impression, even amid the film’s relentless rush. Koto Endo, played by real-life National Deaf Table Tennis champion Koto Kawaguchi, serves as the calm, focused, and anchored rival to Marty’s endless arrogance and raw talent. Steady, deliberate, and quietly monumental, Kawaguchi’s presence provides a clear point of contrast, highlighting Marty’s chaotic brilliance and giving the story a tether to focus.

Where the film risks stumbling is the very same place it ultimately thrives which is in its sheer maximalism. There are moments when you sense the movie straining against itself, but Marty Supreme never apologizes for its intensity. It embraces the mess, the sweat, the fever of ambition. And the more it commits to that, the more the film becomes what it is: a standout film of 2025.

What makes the film stick is its sincerity. Even through the chaos, it speaks a very clear emotional language of hunger. The hunger to matter, the hunger that can border on self-destruction, the hunger to push beyond every limit. The ending’s emotional release hits not because the film earns it logically, but because it earns it viscerally. Your heart is pounding before your brain can catch up.

The bottom line.

Marty Supreme doesn’t reinvent the sports drama. What it does is rarer. It treats ambition — the messy, all-consuming, often irrational kind — with compassion rather than cynicism. Yes, it’s loud. Frenetic, absolutely. But beneath the mania lies something real and messy, something unpolished, and, above all, unapologetically itself. And that’s exactly what makes it resonate.

Cue “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” because Marty Supreme just might.

Marty Supreme hits theaters on Thursday, December 25. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of A24.

Kirsten Saylor