There is something perversely admirable about a person who refuses to apologize for talent and looks at the ordinary life laid out before him and recoils as if being asked to settle for a lesser version of himself. Timothée Chalamet, whose recent run of performances is steadily restoring my faith in the future of the Hollywood movie star, leans fully into that impulse in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. He rejects stability and strives for greatness with such conviction that it resembles destiny.
Chalamet portrays Marty Mauser, a Jewish New Yorker in the 1950s determined to become the greatest table tennis player in the world and to popularize the then-incipient sport in America along the way. The title’s “Supreme” is an allusion to Mauser’s inflated sense of self. He is brimming with certainty, convinced the world is merely lagging behind his inevitable ascent. Chalamet disappears into the role with coiled intensity: abrasive, uncouth, socially graceless, yet magnetic all the same. Marty is the sort of person you instinctively avoid in real life (his every interaction feels like the prelude to a hustle), and yet he commands attention. You root for him not because he is virtuous, but because his willpower is impossible to ignore.
