“I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” said Timothée Chalamet earlier this year at the Screen Actors Guild Awards after winning the best actor prize for his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (2024). His chutzpah was startling but also weirdly charming given the faux-humility of the standard acceptance speech. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he continued, invoking the names of Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, and Michael Jordan. Whatever you make of Timmy’s ego, his remarks offer something of an amuse-bouche to the pleasures of watching him in Marty Supreme, in which he embodies the hubristic table-tennis prodigy Marty Mauser—a proof of concept if ever there was one.

Sporting geeky round glasses, a unibrow, and a moustache, his boyish mug branded with blemishes, 23-year-old Marty works a day job at a shoe store in the Lower East Side, a gig both suited to his powers of persuasion (“I could sell shoes to an amputee!”) and terribly beneath him. It’s New York City, circa 1952, and Marty has ping-pong on the brain. Having honed his skills in the city’s underground table-tennis clubs, where amateurs wager their winnings for quick cash, Marty is set to represent the United States in an upcoming tournament in the UK. No one is as impressed by this as Marty himself, whose quest throughout the film hinges on realizing his gifts to their fullest, dreamiest potential: become the world’s top player, the face of table-tennis in the US; reap lucrative sponsorships, dazzling wealth and fame. Laugh all you want, but the camera, at least, takes him seriously, slowly zooming in on Marty in action like a rapt spectator. His moves tell us that Marty’s got a shot, but is his mega-confidence a real force for manifestation? Or the delusions of a selfish man persuaded of his own divine rights?

This tragicomic calculus is signature Safdie. Streetwise spirals into chaos centered on charismatic hustlers with gambling addictions in films like Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019) have made Josh and Benny Safdie as the leading practitioners of a strain of engrossingly anxious American cinema, finding the moral conflicts in dog-eat-dog schemes in their tales of New York. Josh Safdie’s first solo directorial project without his brother Benny, Marty Supreme follows suit to a curious degree—in part because the elder Safdie continues to work with some of the duo’s key collaborators, their editor and co-writer Ronald Bronstein, composer Daniel Lopatin, and cinematographer Darius Khondji. Marty Supreme’s opening credits mirror those of Uncut Gems, in which the........

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