Marty Mauser, the irrepressible hero of Josh Safdie’s electrifying new movie, is rocketing toward his American dream at the speed of sound, running and racing while working every conceivable angle. It’s 1952 New York, and Marty — played with ferocious verve and pinwheeling arms by Timothée Chalamet — is a table-tennis shark and aspiring world champion. He’s a classic striver ping-ponging between worlds and loyalties, between the ties that bind and a complex freedom, between community and self. His horizons seem within reach, but because life for Marty is one hurdle after another it’s also one hustle after another.
A hyper-charged take on a bildungsroman, “Marty Supreme” is one of the most thoroughly pleasurable American movies of the year and one of the most exciting. Part of what makes it electric is how organically its numerous parts — its themes, characters, camera movements and accelerated pacing — fit together in a whirring whole. The film touches on big, weighty subjects like Jewish identity, family, community, class, assimilation and success, but it isn’t didactic and doesn’t serve up any life lessons, in the pious finger-wagging manner of many American independent movies. Its ideas are one with its realism, with its many layers, lush textures, anarchic furor, squalid apartments, jampacked streets and tenacious, pulsing life.
There’s plenty to chew over, but Safdie is as much a natural entertainer as a born filmmaker (not every director is both): He wants to grab hold of you, and once he does, he doesn’t let go. (His earlier features include “Uncut Gems,” directed with his brother, Benny.) He’s got an ideal hook in Chalamet’s Marty, a charmer-schemer whose ambition fuels the story and takes him from the good, old Lower East Side to points across the globe. He’s a sensational character (inspired by a real tennis-table champ, Marty Reisman) in a film crammed with the kind of vivid personalities and unhomogenized faces — creased, lopsided, beautiful — whose singularity is being increasingly expunged from American mainstream entertainment.
Marty is working in a cramped shoe store when the story opens, trying and failing to squeeze a female customer’s substantial foot into a daintier selection. It’s the first of a series of setbacks for Marty, who almost immediately fobs the customer onto another clerk so he can service his married girlfriend, Rachel (the charismatic Odessa A’Zion), in the backroom. Within minutes of zipping up, Marty is hurdling toward his future. He tries to persuade his boss to bankroll a venture, pulls out a gun, commits a crime, flees the apartment that he shares with his mother (Fran Drescher) and flies to London, where he meets a new romantic interest, Kay (a terrific Gwyneth Paltrow), a bitterly married ex-Hollywood star.
Safdie and his co-writer, his longtime collaborator Robert Bronstein, keep Marty busy with dreams and schemes — he wants to create a signature line of orange table-tennis balls — and knotty personal entanglements. Marty is angling to become a world champion, a single-minded goal that creates a strong narrative through-line that regularly spins off into comically frenzied, at times brutal detours. Safdie is very good at orchestrating chaos, and while he often plays these interludes — with their leering faces and thrashing bodies — for horrified laughs, they also create a mounting, anxious sense of instability. At any moment, something can go wrong and often does, knocking people off course and worlds off their axes.
Yet Marty has remarkable staying power, and for all his misadventures and the spasms of convulsive violence that he hurdles over, he rarely falters. His drive is one reason, even if from the start its clear that he has support from people in his life, including Rachel and his pal, Wally (Tyler Okonma a.k.a. Tyler, the Creator), another player who Marty periodically teams up with to relieve suckers of their cash. Marty’s relationship with his mother is, by contrast, inexplicably combative to the point of hostility; his father is M.I.A. Whatever else he is, Marty isn’t the stereotype of a mama’s boy — that noxious, sexist cliché of the putatively effete, emasculated Jewish man. Marty is an athlete and a tough, streetwise New Yorker.
The city is one of the film’s triumphs, a Lost New York that Safdie, with his crew (Jack Fisk is the production designer), has beautifully reimagined and populated with a vivid supporting cast (Sandra Bernhard and a volcanic Abel Ferrara, among others). It’s here, amid unreconstructed tenement apartments — with their shared toilets in the stairwells and archaeological layers of paint — and among cluttered downtown stores and mysterious, dimly lit table-tennis parlors, that Marty came to be. There’s a romance and danger here, and movie love, too. Ken Jacobs’s great 1955 nonfiction film “Orchard Street” is one inspiration. The influence of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 “Mean Streets” is just as conspicuous, and there’s more than a hint of Johnny Boy, Robert DeNiro’s character from that film, in Marty’s swagger.
Gently deglamorized, his face a moonscape of zits and scars, Chalamet inhabits Marty fully with quicksilver emotional changes, a physically grounded performance and, crucially, a deep-veined vulnerability. Marty can be cruel, carelessly or not, but the expansiveness of his sensitivities is an argument in his favor. He’s especially unkind to Rachel, a childhood friend whose love he sees as a trap. (He tells her in one fraught exchange that while he has a purpose, she doesn’t.) Kay, by stark contrast, is a glamorous emissary from another world. They catch each other’s eye in London and, before long, Kay is sneaking out of the hotel suite she’s sharing with her husband (Kevin O’Leary) and slipping out of her fur in Marty’s rooms.
Kay’s entrance complicates both Marty’s life and the story, putting into dramatic form the tension between his explicitly Jewish world and the larger, at times aggressively hostile non-Jewish world. The filmmakers don’t often overtly reference Marty’s Jewish identity; it’s a given, like the Lower East Side air he breathes. On the foreign land of London, however, his identity is foregrounded in a series of scenes, by turns squirmy and wildly strange, that include one in which Marty makes a shocking joke about Auschwitz to some reporters. “It’s all right,” he laughs. “I’m Jewish, I can say that.” He then announces that he’s Hitler’s worst nightmare. “Look at me,” Marty says. “I’m here,” which is as self-serving as it is poignant.
This moment sets up the most haunting and meaningful section in the film that, in several brisk, freighted scenes — including a flashback centered on a startlingly surreal Holocaust survival story — briefly scramble the timeline and firmly bridge the near-past with the present. (A similar sense of historical continuity is created on the soundtrack, which includes Oneohtrix Point Never’s synthesized score, blasts of 1980s pop — Tears for Fears, etc. — as well as period and classical music.) At that point, the world seems like Marty’s oyster. He’s come to compete in the British Tennis Table Open and will soon play the Japanese ace, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, a real championship player). Marty is at the top of his game, with a strong attack and the burning confidence that draws others to him even as it also singes them.
After seeing the film the first time, I flashed on Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel “What Makes Sammy Run?,” whose tragic title character (a “frantic marathoner”) lays others to waste on his mercenary climb to the top. For all their respective mileage, though, Marty is Sammy’s stark antithesis. Marty has drives and desires, yet his course isn’t that of the classic bootstrapping American individual. Marty has family and he has friends (however fraught), and he has the buzzing Lower East Side, that glorious hive of immigrant aspirations, struggles and victories. Like Marty, Sammy sprung from there, as well as from America. Yet Marty, even during his darkest, most solitary moments, is also cradled by other people and by love. He is Hitler’s worst nightmare: Marty is here and he is hungrily, blissfully alive.
Marty Supreme Rated R for gun and trophy violence, and language. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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