The Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig, the Shark Tank shark Kevin O’Leary, and Timothée Chalamet walk into a bar. The bar is the restaurant of the London Ritz, and it’s 1952. Gwyneth Paltrow is also there, at another table. O’Leary, playing the part of the ink tycoon Milton Rockwell in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, notices the tattoo on the arm of Röhrig’s character, Béla Kletzki. “He used to defuse bombs for the Nazis,” says Timothée, as the ping-pong ingenue Marty Mauser. “Tell ’em the story you told me.” “My guests are waiting,” Rockwell replies. “Wait,” says Marty, “you’re gonna love this.”

Kletzki tells him that, out of respect for his table tennis talent, guards at Auschwitz used to give him unexploded ordnance to defuse, a job that allowed him to leave the camp for a few hours. One day he noticed a beehive, smoked the bees out, and covered himself in honey to bring back to his fellow prisoners under his uniform: cut to a poundingly soundtracked shot of starving men licking honey off Kletzki’s bare chest. While he’s telling this story the unibrowed, mustachioed Marty has been making grotesque faces over his shoulder to the fading actress Kay Strong (Paltrow), Rockwell’s wife; later that night she shows up at his room.

This is Josh Safdie’s first film directed without his brother Benny in almost two decades (since 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed), but Marty Supreme, like much of the Safdie brothers’ world, is powered by nudnikery like Marty’s—beginning with the premise, which, along with an elaborate marketing campaign, dares an audience to watch with a straight face a movie in which a greasy, whiny Timothée Chalamet plays an international table tennis champion. In Daddy Longlegs (2009) and Uncut Gems (2019), too, Martyesque men pursue whatever it is they feel they’re owed, leaving behind them piles of hurt feelings, bad graces, and increasingly dire consequences. As J. Hoberman observed in an essay about Uncut Gems, which follows Adam Sandler’s overleveraged jeweler around for a few days as his life collapses,

Homo safdiens is a desperate character—single-minded yet scattered, temperamentally outrageous and increasingly frantic, monumentally lucky but also cursed—a guy who, not unlike a certain kind of filmmaker careening from one crisis to another, connives, blunders, and improvises his way to the metaphoric end of the night.

More so than Sandler’s Howard Ratner, Marty believes utterly in his own talent, his own hard work, and his ability to prove himself in front of the most hostile audiences, from the maître d’ at the Ritz to a Japanese crowd seven years after the end of World War II. But it’s never clear that it would be, actually, good for Marty to win. The movie charts his multipart quest to get to the world championships in Tokyo in the face of a series of obstacles both structural and of his own creation. If he makes it to Japan and wins, which he never doubts he will, he’ll be the first American to do so, bringing unprecedented global attention to the sport.

Casting around for funding for his trip to Japan, Marty’s thickly spectacled eye falls on Rockwell (the name of his company, Rockwell Ink, is possibly derived from the postwar behemoth Rockwell Manufacturing Company). Rockwell, played by O’Leary with polite WASPish menace, finds Marty hard to stomach and suggests he jump through an increasingly humiliating series of hoops; his bitterness is in part born of grief for his son, killed in the war, who was presumably better behaved. Marty, who has recently lost his father but is in no need of a surrogate one, sees Rockwell as a vanquished sexual rival. Above this mutual contempt rises the shared pursuit of profit, which Marty in his innocence takes to mean they can meet halfway up that mountain. But Rockwell, having been tipped off to ping-pong’s potential lucre in the Japanese market, doesn’t need to budge. His private plane flies to Tokyo with or without Marty on board.

Safdie has retained several of the brothers’ close collaborators, from their cowriter Ronald Bronstein to their composer, Daniel Lopatin, as well as the qualities that made the more mature Safdie collaborations (including Good Time, from 2017) seem so unlike other Hollywood fare: an indelible sense of place, a real reverence for cinematic forebears, a principled attempt to surprise and shock, an only intermittently lurid interest in abject settings and emotions. But the film’s ambition, like Marty Mauser’s, oversteps its ability. Detours into violence and family melodrama are both predictable and unnecessary, setting the movie loose from its strengths. It ends with Marty in tears, crushed as he finally accepts a grave responsibility: a belated admission of defeat to the superego.

*

The Safdies grew up in middle-class New York, in the charmed gap between the precarity of working-class life and the stultifying rites of the upper strata, though Marty Supreme retains a romantic fascination with both. The brothers make emphatically New York movies, lavishing attention on its grime and hustle, and Marty Mauser is emphatically from the Lower East Side, escaping from Italian cops with the help of Chinese cooks and running through sets that might have been from Joan Micklin Silver’s late-nineteenth-century period drama Hester Street (1975). Though by 1952 the Loisaida was emerging, this was still an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood, as seen bustling in the late Ken Jacobs’s short documentary Orchard Street (1955), and as would persist through Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1988).

A fuzzy sort of class war takes shape over the movie, which begins with Marty rejecting his mother’s dreams of slow, steady upward mobility and the hope of his childhood sweetheart Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) that he will acknowledge paternity of their child. He has absolute contempt for his fellow employees at the shoe shop owned by his uncle, and would rather hide in a dumpster than accept his offer to manage it. Marty doesn’t like to present himself as an underdog—he knows everyone likes a winner—but the strong sense of grievance he carries occasionally emerges, as when he presents his mother (a bedraggled Fran Drescher) with a souvenir from his travel in Cairo, a piece of stone we’ve just seen him hacking off a pyramid: “We built that,” he reminds her.

Like many New Yorkers Safdie is clearly taken in by the romance of the tenement, even though the Lower East Side by then wasn’t really a slum. Marty and his mother have their own rooms, and even a little sunlight, though the whole building shares a telephone line. There’s plenty of life within the apartment complex—the women of the building huddle with concern outside the apartment where, as everyone can hear, Rachel’s husband has discovered her infidelity—but, strangely, very little sense of the texture of the city outside. Marty never takes the subway or the bus to the ping-pong club, based on the legendary parlor Lawrence’s, in Midtown; he just seems to arrive. Settings that demand proper landscapes, like Central Park, are assembled from little more than recognizable landmarks. Climactic scenes are set not in the city but in Japan and New Jersey. When Marty sprints through the neighborhood the hubbub outside is more reminiscent of Annie (1982) than anything else, busyness alone not guaranteeing realism.

The audience is constantly jogged out of time, often in ways that feel clever and exciting. The sound design of the game scenes, which isolates the unpredictable heartbeat of the ping-pong ball hitting the table, makes them particularly riveting, and in general the Eighties New Wave–heavy soundtrack makes much of anachronism. At other times this looseness with reality seems more like a strange form of secondhand nostalgia: Marty’s run takes him past the Moscot store at 94 Rivington, even though by the Fifties the store had been at the corner of Orchard and Delancey for almost two decades.

But the biggest distraction from the story, what comes to feel like its own subplot, is the relentless stunt casting, which means few characters in the movie are allowed an independent life. The mystery of what kind of woman thinks about buying an armadillo for her son is quickly solved when we realize she’s Lizzi Bougatsos. “This is Merle, my publicist,” Kay says. Actually, he’s Isaac Mizrahi. Is her assistant simply nervous because, being the New Yorker writer Naomi Fry, she’s unused to being in front of the camera? Is it a joke that David Mamet is a bad director? (Those last three are from just one subplot.) With the exception of the supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis, who’s mostly stuck in closeup, the first-time actors pull off their parts. Pico Iyer is perfect as Ram Sethi, the improbable head of the worldwide table-tennis association.

Even the professional actors are there as a bit of a gimmick—especially Paltrow, cast as a patrician uptown actress from a bygone era of movies, but also Chalamet, in a role written for him. Chalamet, too, grew up in middle-class New York, the son of a Jewish American dancer and real estate agent and a French journalist; beside their origins, another thing Safdie and Chalamet share is an appreciation for the latter’s adolescent stage presence, a single-minded ferocity visible on YouTube uploads of performances from his time at LaGuardia High School. His entry to the 2012 school variety show could slot neatly into the Safdieverse, right through the last few seconds, when applause for “Timmy Tim” drowns out the next entrants as they begin “The Sound of Silence.” Chalamet reports that when he struggled to achieve Marty’s preposterous walk, Safdie instructed him to channel this teenage self.

Today Chalamet is often cited as one of the last movie stars (Robert Pattinson, the lead in Good Time, is sometimes mentioned as another): his distinctive look, his strange and unsettling intensity, and his willingness to make himself ridiculous combine energetically onscreen. He has diligently practiced ping-pong since he and Safdie first discussed the project in 2018, bringing tables and Olympic trainers with him to movie sets across the world. Having achieved “the voice” with similar effort in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, here Chalamet has reclaimed his own. It is a definitively twenty-first-century voice, ebonics-inflected, slightly slurred—another deliberate anachronism, another slip between character and actor.

Even if you managed to avoid the hysterical marketing campaign around the film—the Marty Supreme jackets seen on everyone from Misty Copeland to Tom Brady were also briefly available for purchase at a pop-up store in Soho—Chalamet’s cheekbones and spaghettine body, notable even when covered with Marty Mauser’s pockmarks or Bob Dylan’s shrugging overcoats, are a reminder how sleekly the film world intertwines with that of fashion. The film’s multi-month publicity tour, which involved several bizarre videos, is also a reminder of the ever-stranger relationship between art and selling things in general.

Safdie has perhaps grown overdependent on such intrusions from the real world to collage together his sense of vérité. But the movie is most successful, in fact achieves a kind of rapture, as a character study of a monomaniac dedicated to a slightly silly craft; it doesn’t matter so much whether that craft is table tennis or playing an alien princeling onscreen. The promotional footage of Timothée walking around New York surrounded by people with ping-pong balls for heads could bleed seamlessly into the montage in the movie where Marty, on a money-making tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, is forced to play against a sea lion.

*

Much of Marty Supreme was loosely inspired by the autobiography of Marty Reisman, like the filmic Marty a Jewish American midcentury table tennis professional and hyperverbal hustler who grew up in New York, traveled the world with the Globetrotters, and, as others embraced new innovations like sponge-covered paddles, stuck stubbornly to the hardbat style of play. At the 1952 world championship his Japanese opponent beat him with a new soft paddle, the same kind Marty Mauser’s rival Koto Endo uses in the movie. (Marty evens the score a bit by wearing white instead of the standard black in their final meetup, making it a little harder for Endo to track the ball. Plus, as he says, white looks better: “To me that’s luxury. That’s class.”)

Endo is a minimal presence onscreen, darting to meet Marty’s ball with as little movement as required. When he wins a game he falls flat on his back, no hullaballoo. And he never says anything: as a result of the American firebombing of Tokyo, Endo is deaf (he is played by Koto Kawaguchi, a deaf ping-pong player in real life—I’ll admit I didn’t recognize him), which means, as we are surely meant to feel, that at the very least he’s free from the worst of Marty’s bullshit.

The film is clear about the toll of the war on all sides. (Perhaps too clear—why would Marty know or care about Japanese visa bans?) But Marty is ultimately less focused on the weight of history than on reaching the very top. His response to the horror is, naturally, to make hacky jokes about dominating his rivals at the table: he promises to drop “a third atom bomb on their heads” before his first match with Endo and, ahead of his match with Kletzki, to “do to [him] what Auschwitz couldn’t.” In other words he’s an American, which may in fact make him “Hitler’s worst nightmare” (his words). It’s Kletzki, having actually been through hell, who urges Marty to swallow his pride and swap his paddle for a frying pan for the Globetrotter tour; as he says, it’s good money.

Exodus and Auschwitz may be close to mind, but the primary sense the audience gets of Safdie’s own indebtedness to the Jewish past is in prizing impiety, garrulousness, and chutzpah in the face of polite gentile society. There was more to Reisman’s talent, however, than his loud mouth: unlike Marty, his mother was an immigrant, and he learned table tennis and Hebrew in the associations that scaffolded new Jewish life in New York. When we meet Marty, by contrast, he’s already competing internationally and has nothing but scorn for the milieu of his birth. Marty Supreme is a self-consciously Jewish film, but its meticulous casting of recognizably contemporary figures and attention to details of garment and glamour highlight the distance between Chalamet’s world and Reisman’s as much as they run them together. What Safdie wants to offer, it becomes clear in Tokyo, is simply an American story.

To the extent that we think of professional ping-pong now, it’s as a primarily Asian sport, in the US as in the rest of the world; Reisman ended up spending several years in Asia after his defeat, following the table tennis money. There was a brief resurgence in American interest in the sport once Japan’s preeminence yielded to China’s—especially as relations with China thawed in the 1970s, the two countries entered into what was gleefully called “ping-pong diplomacy.”¹ In the movie’s scenes of actual play, the pat war between the Upper and Lower East Sides yields to a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost.

Marty Supreme successfully recreates the conditions that made it possible for a hardheaded young man to believe he could make ping-pong a national sport: the uncertainty of the years of reconstruction, global alliances shifting underfoot; the sense that growth could be exponential. Explaining to Sethi why he should be put up at the Ritz, all Marty has to do is remind him that he’s coming from the US, and bringing an enormous, emerging market with him. The editor of Look, he enthuses at one point to Catsimatidis’s character, can’t stop running pictures of him. “He loves me,” he says. “They all love me.”