Supreme cinema

Kinetic, frenetic, incredibly anxiety-provoking, this cynical sideways take on the underdog sports story delivers the kind of out-and-out chaos that actually requires a lot of cinematic precision.

Filmmaker Josh Safdie’s sardonic comic-drama, Marty Supreme, is both completely assured and slightly insane, and it’s held together by a tricky, nervy, live-wire performance by Timothée Chalamet.

Safdie has previously partnered with brother Benny on such films as Good Time and Uncut Gems, with the pair specializing in everyone-shouting-at-once havoc. Here Josh is solo director, while sharing a screenwriting credit with frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein.

Marty Supreme takes us back to the 1950s and New York’s Lower East Side, where Marty Mauser (Chalamet) is working at his uncle’s shoe store just long enough to make the fare to England for an international table tennis tournament.

Marty, in his own head, has already crowned himself world table tennis champion and is just waiting for the rest of the globe to catch up. An obnoxious, big-talking motormouth, Marty is so single-minded in the pursuit of his own greatness that he barely notices he’s letting down everyone around him.

Caught in the path of his callousness and carelessness are his mother, Rebecca (Fran Drescher from The Nanny), his pal Wally (Tyler Okonma, a.k.a. the musician Tyler, The Creator) and his pregnant girlfriend Rachel (I Love LA’s Odessa A’zion), along with various employers, acquaintances and neighbours.

Marty’s self-involved saga takes him to London and Tokyo, to the edges of New York’s criminal underworld and the fringes of Manhattan high life. One of the film’s many interconnecting subplots centres on a chance meeting with Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a one-time Hollywood star now safely married to wealthy magnate Milton Rockwell. (Rockwell is played by Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian business guy from Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank, and while this might sound like a bit of stunt casting, O’Leary delivers a completely convincing performance as a rich jerk.)

Meanwhile, there’s a (literal) shaggy dog story involving the beloved canine companion of Ezra Mishkin (cult director Abel Ferrara), a low-level gangster you do not want to cross.

Things fall through floors. Things blow up. There are fist fights and shootouts and car chases, all choreographed and shot with dizzying, dynamic verve. Since this is (kind of) a sports flick, there are intermittent ping-pong games, which are absolutely dazzling to watch. (This, despite recurring jokes from Marty’s detractors about table tennis not being a sport.)

Safdie enjoys turning things upside down. He has created a period piece of the most stringently anti-nostalgic kind, packed with dark and grimy realism. He even manages to make the gorgeously cheek-boned Chalamet kind of homely, shooting him in unflattering light and giving him prosthetic acne scars and a weedy little moustache.

For his part, Chalamet forgoes his usual charm and replaces it with sheer chutzpah. Marty is a liar, a hustler, a thief. “I have a purpose in life,” he says, by way of justifying all the collateral wreckage he causes.

While this might sound like another glamorization of male narcissism, another excuse for badly behaved genius, Safdie and Bronstein are also tweaking these tropes. In their unsparing look at the devastation that surrounds Marty, they expose not just his individual egotism but the seamy underside of the American dream.

Most sports flicks offer uplifting story arcs and characters you can root for. Marty Supreme goes its own wild way, with darkly funny performances and some brash, bravura filmmaking.

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