A Dishonest Living – Marty Supreme

We’re less than 24 hours away from this year’s Oscar Blitz, with nominations due tomorrow morning. As usual, it’s been a bit of a sprint to catch up on everything I might have missed in the last year, as well as keeping up with all the end-of-year Awards Season contenders. But 2025 was extreme even by my standards. Thanks to my financial and employment difficulties, I had to put off a lot of viewings until I was at least somewhat more secure. As such, between the first of November and now, I’ve crammed in a massive 42 films so far, and I still have a few on my personal list, which I’m sure will be added to once we have the nominees. For comparison, including film festivals, I only saw 66 movies the rest of the year. If you take out the fests, it’s closer to 50. That’s how much I’ve mainlined in just the last 10 weeks, and why my review backlog is even longer than normal.

The last of the major contenders that I saw in theatres (there are others I caught on VOD and streamers that I’ll cover in batch posts) is Marty Supreme, released in the final week of the year, and which has garnered endless praise, to the point that star Timothée Chalamet is the morning line favorite for Best Actor, having already emerged victorious at the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe Awards earlier this month. It’s a bit funny to me, because just a year ago he was hosting Saturday Night Live, and the joke was that he was never going to win. Even in his opening monologue he did a bit where he got to pretend he was going to hear his name, only for the punch line to be that he still lost to Kenan Thompson. That episode aired almost exactly one year ago, and now he’s but a few weeks away from glory.

So naturally, even before going in, there was a curiosity about why he was beating one of the strongest fields in recent memory, including the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Joel Edgerton, Ethan Hawke, Wagner Moura, and Michael B. Jordan. What was it about this performance that put him over the top? Having now seen the film, I get it. He wouldn’t necessarily get my vote, but he does do a great job here, and given his output to date, I more than understand why the Oscar is his to lose. As for the rest of the flick? Well, we’ll get to that.

Directed by Josh Safdie, and co-written by him and Ronald Bronstein (a frequent collaborator with the Safdie brothers, including on films like Good Time and Uncut Gems), Marty Supreme does a sort of neo-noir take on the sports biopic, with Chalamet playing the title character, Marty Mauser, an American table tennis player in the 1950s, loosely based on real-life champion Marty Reisman. Styled very similarly to Gems, the film is a darkly comic, gritty examination of a deeply-flawed but undeniably talented individual attempting to hustle his way to the top, and whether he’s able to keep his most destructive impulses at bay long enough to succeed.

This is the main reason why Chalamet is the frontrunner for the Academy Award. He’s playing incredibly against type. Marty is the protagonist of this story, but in almost every aspect, he’s also the villain. Chalamet has played some roguish characters before, like the school “bad boy” Kyle in Lady Bird, the drug-addicted Nic Sheff in Beautiful Boy, or a somewhat brash interpretation of Bob Dylan just last year in A Complete Unknown, but he’s never been an out-and-out bad guy. This is the closest he’s ever come. Marty is great at his game, and because of that skill, he feels entitled to wealth, fame, and the deference and patronage of everyone around him.

For the bulk of the runtime, nearly everything he tries is in pursuit of his professional ambitions, even things that are extremely dubious from ethical and legal standpoints. The film opens with him impregnating his childhood friend Rachel (Pamela Adlon’s daughter Odessa A’zion), despite her being married, and he spends the duration of the picture denying that the baby is his. He ropes his gullible friend Dion (newcomer Luke Manley, who gained notoriety over YouTube sports takes) into a shady business deal where he hopes to market orange ping-pong balls as a novelty item, and further takes advantage of Dion’s kind nature and naivete in the back half of the story. He steals money from his uncle’s shoe store – where he works at the start of the movie – to “settle” unpaid wages so he can fly to the U.K. for the table tennis British Open tournament, where he’s confident he’ll win and become a national celebrity.

While at the tournament, he gives interviews where he plays up his antagonistic persona, and catches a glimpse of an actress named Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow). He berates her into an illicit affair, and then tries to con her husband, Milton Rockwell, played by Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary. This is a bit of stunt casting, as O’Leary is not a professional actor, but has a reputation for being the big jerk on the business pitch TV show. He’s ironically nicknamed “Mr. Wonderful” because he’s often the one tasked with crushing the dreams of the more delusional contestants and with seeking the most rapacious and usurious deals with those who have potential, giving himself as much ownership and control of every product possible. This is, by design, a means to make us root for Marty, because most of us in the audience are aware in a meta sense that there’s an even bigger baddie out there, and O’Leary is happy to oblige in some of the film’s darker moments.

All of Marty’s actions are predicated on the idea that he’s going to be, as he says, “staring at you from the Wheaties box” after he wins the British Open, and then eventually, the World Championship. Unfortunately, he loses the Open in the finals to a Japanese player named Koto Endo (real-world pro Koto Kawaguchi), who uses a new type of paddle. That loss, coupled with the fact that Marty fraudulently expensed a stay at the Ritz hotel (he had previously complained to the tournament director, played by Pico Iyer, that the accommodations provided to all the players were beneath his standards and position), has resulted in Marty being banned from the World Championships until he pays a hefty fine. Rockwell offers Marty a sponsorship contract to play in the tournament, which will be held in Japan because Endo did become an icon for his win, but balks when he’s asked to perform in an exhibition with Endo that he will have to throw for the sake of publicity.

From that point on, the story is about Marty pulling out every stop, hustle, con job, and trick he can think of to raise the money, all while evading the consequences of his actions. That’s what makes him the real villain in this story. To a degree, you can get behind him as someone who’s confident in his abilities but just needs the right set of circumstances to make it all pay off. He’s gambling on himself, something we all do from time to time. The difference is in the approach. For example, I, like many others, have been struggling to make ends meet and get stable, gainful employment. I know my talents, and I know they can be put to the best of uses. So over the last year, when unforeseen events forced me to spend money I really didn’t have to bury another relative (and in a much less vital context, replace my phone and television), that was me gambling on myself that I’d get the right job in short order, and all would be back in order. It hasn’t worked out that way so far, but I keep trying, even though the pressure on my bank account continues to build.

Compare that to Marty. First of all, unlike so many of us, he is flush with opportunities to make an honest go of it. As we see at the beginning of the film, he’s offered a management role at his uncle’s shoe store. It’s a job he doesn’t want, and there’s a degree of nepotism here, as he’s given the job over the more qualified Lloyd (Ralph Colucci), because Uncle Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a well-known New York music journalist) wants Marty to give up on ping pong and help out his mother (Fran Drescher). There’s a fine line Marty has to walk, because we can empathize with him pursuing a dream in the face of family members who don’t believe in him, and even when Marty steals the money from Murray’s vault, there’s almost a degree of qualification because it’s back pay that Murray owes him, and there’s character behavior to suggest he intentionally withheld the wages specifically to prevent Marty from going to London.

But that’s the problem. Most of us don’t even get that cushy job offer, much less the salary that goes with it, and Marty just dismisses it because it’s not what he wants. Would it be inconvenient to work around his athletic ambitions? Of course. But rather than attempt to make the time and balance things out, which most passionate people with dreams and goals try to do, he just expects to be supported and endorsed with no compromise. How dare anyone ask him to work a job he thinks he’s too good for? Part of the reason I took my previous job in sales – apart from the fact that they were the first to say “yes” in over a year – was that they understood that none of us should be doing the job forever, and they had several people over the years who were in my exact situation, working for the company because we were in a deep lull in our industry careers and really didn’t have a better option on the table. My boss even said plainly on several occasions that he, and the company writ large, never wanted to hold us back, because they knew this was likely no one’s ideal position. Rather, he wanted myself and others to see the company as a place where we could “come home” in between gigs. He outright encouraged us to take that next job when it came along, and after it was done, pick back up with him. Sadly, because I got laid off three weeks ago, that’s no longer available to me, personally, but it was a great corporate ethos.

In short, Marty is constantly given options to achieve his goals legitimately and properly, yet at every turn, he always takes the most self-serving form of instant gratification instead of thinking things through, because he refuses to give an inch in regards to his master plan. In that respect, he’s another version of Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner from Uncut Gems, only Marty’s gambling addiction is more personal and abstract. Marty’s circumstances become so extreme that it stretches the boundaries of belief, making him look all the more pathetic as he goes. A freak accident puts him in a situation where a mobster (Abel Ferrara) offers him a tidy sum simply to take his dog to the vet. Rather than do a simple task and bank the cash, he teams up with his friend Wally (Tyler, the Creator) to hustle ping pong games with the mobster’s money, and then insists on keeping all of it for himself, even when the scam leads to Wally incurring severe financial damage, simply because the total doesn’t cover 100% of Marty’s presumed expenses, both for his fines and the luxuries he feels he deserves. He steals a necklace from Kay and tries to pawn it, only to realize it’s worthless costume jewelry, and when he’s found out, Kay offers him a real trinket. A series of farcical events leads to Kay using the jewelry to bribe a cop, so Marty inexplicably asks for another one, never for a moment caring about the humiliation and imprisonment he just barely evaded! We’re always told that it takes hard work to succeed, but Marty always wants the shortcut, because in his mind, being good at table tennis is the only hard work he ever had to put forth.

And for what it’s worth, we only see a few glimpses of him actually being good at the sport, not nearly enough to justify this level of arrogance. It honestly makes you question how he’s able to seduce both Rachel and Kay, who otherwise demonstrate through their own agency and intellect that they should know better. Marty is, at best, a straight up cad, and at worst, he’s an abusive deadbeat who takes advantage of them at every opportunity. One wonders what his appeal really is. I mean, apart from looking like Timothée Chalam–oooooohhhhhhh.

So yeah, that’s the biggest explanation as to why Chalamet has the inside track at the moment. The other point in his favor is that, to be perfectly frank, he holds the film together. Almost none of the events of the story work except through his force of will, and his charismatic presence is what allows the viewer to dismiss the other disparate elements of the flick that just wouldn’t gel otherwise. While Safdie definitely goes for a sardonic tone and a darker motif, most of the time it doesn’t really make sense. This is best demonstrated by the two main positive aspects of Marty’s character, i.e. his skills on the table and the bedroom. How do we know that Rachel’s baby is his? Well, because as soon as they boom-boom, we get a sequence lifted straight from Look Who’s Talking, where we see the sperm fertilize the egg. That entire scene has nothing to do with the rest of the film, and no other is composed in such a manner, so why is it there? When it comes to the actual table tennis, most of the scenes, be they in seedy New York gaming halls or the British Open, are filmed in dark, dank rooms with very little light. It’s meant to make the scene look more intense, but I’m just sitting in my seat begging someone to flick a switch, because there’s no way anyone can see in such an environment to play properly. How are the players meant to see a tiny, white ball when the only light is a bar lamp directly over the table? Half the soundtrack is made up of non-diegetic tracks from the 1980s, particularly from New Order and Tears for Fears, but their thematic resonance, coupled with Chalamet’s swagger, somehow makes it so they don’t feel terribly out of place.

The only production elements that truly shine outside of our “hero” are the cinematography and physicality of the table tennis itself. Chalamet trained extensively for months, and former Olympians were brought in as consultants, to make the action of the sport look as real and exciting as possible, and the shots are very effective despite the terrible lighting scheme. You can tell when the ball transitions from being a live prop to a digital one, but for the most part, it’s not all that distracting. Instead, you have all the involved actors doing an incredible mix of mime and intense athleticism relative to the small scale of the game, with the camera coming in extra tight and close up to make you feel like you’re right there next to the table watching it all unfold. It’s kind of like how in boxing movies the fights are shot far more cinematically and choreographed far more dramatically than the mundane look it has on live television. There’s still a ton of coordination and skill involved in making the matches look almost pedestrian when you see the elites go at it, but it doesn’t always translate when we’re watching from a detached perspective like a static overhead camera or a ringside setup that just occasionally pans left and right. Safdie expertly creates an immersive experience here, making the sport the most exciting it’s been since Forrest Gump (not a high bar to clear, but still impressive).

If Marty were played by anyone else, I don’t think this movie would be nearly as entertaining as it is. Like its lead, it still has a mess of problems, but in a weird sort of alchemy, because of Chalemet, it somehow works, even when all logic would say it shouldn’t. Pretty much every moment not centering on his performance is glaringly off, particularly when it comes to the stunt casting and the creative elements that don’t fit the tone of the actual subject matter. As the old saying goes, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, and there are several moments where Safdie gets a little too high on his own supply of said to make the situation believable, even in a film about a man who fancies himself the ultimate bullshitter. But Chalamet is able to pick up that poop like an expert dog-walker and deliver something that almost resembles greatness, much like his intentionally unlikable character. Is this one of the best films of 2025? No. Is this Chalamet’s best performance? Also no. I’d personally argue that Bob Dylan, Laurie from Little Women, and his turns as Paul Atreides in the Dune series are better. But will I be pissed off if he breaks through and takes home the gold? Absolutely not. Just like Marty, Chalamet is chomping at the bit for a big win, and it would be oddly poetic if playing an overconfident loser is what finally gets him there.

Grade: B+

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Who gets your vote for Best Actor? How many times did you dramatically spike a ping pong ball in gym class? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!