American hustle: "Marty Supreme"

2025 will go down as the year in which, disregarding all previous instincts, the Safdie brothers embraced the happy ending and won themselves a whole new audience. In last October's The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie observed a punchdrunk rope-a-doper as - against his previous instincts - he negotiated a soft landing for himself; the only trouble was that the film's box-office numbers proved softer still. Launched on a wave of hype over Christmas, Marty Supreme - directed by Josh Safdie from a script he wrote with Ronald Bronstein - is the tale of a dreamer and schemer who makes things happen and wins big. As with The Smashing Machine, it's a sports biopic in the leftfield, Coen brothers sense, following the ever-driven Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) - a young table tennis whizz modelled on the real-life Marty Reisman - as he progresses from kid to mensch and from nobody to star in the immediate post-War years. Yet as ever with all things Safdie, the destination proves secondary to the rattling journey. Much as the protagonists of Good Time and Uncut Gems were pushed to extremes - in those cases, to no good end - Marty Mauser will be tested, put through the ringer, taken down a peg or two, tossed out with the trash, chased from pillar to post, tugged hither and thither, sent halfway around the world, halfway insane and to hell and back; even when he finally catches a break and gets a night off from this relentless, nerve-shredding grind, he finds himself obliged to endure a Broadway show in its entirety. This is not a film you would want to experience in 4DX, unless you particularly sought to emerge shaking like a jackhammer; it also makes for an altogether oddball awards contender. At various points, Safdie's film resembles The Brutalist replayed as farce, Cassavetes dragged backwards through a hedge and into the multiplex, and a Marvel movie fished from a municipal dump, engineered as it has been towards the generation of pummelling setpieces and stunts. What's inarguable is that Marty Supreme is a genuine motion picture. Of what calibre, we shall see.

Before this 150-minute film exhausts you into clinging to its coattails and just seeing where it's heading, you may be given pause to consider what its slender, perverse, idiosyncratic fable means to represent. On some level, Marty Supreme is Safdie shooting for the respectability that was finally beyond the much-touted Uncut Gems, a stress test that may actually have finished off Academy voters with fainter hearts. This, by contrast, is a begrimed period drama, opening amid the mercantile New York of the early 1950s and possibly drawing on the memories of various Safdie and Bronstein elders; Marty, who begins the film as a lowly salesman in the city's most chaotic shoe shop, stands for all those Jewish scrappers who emerged from the shadow of WW2 to reorder and reinvent American society. (Those early scenes seem to flow out of brother Benny's acting gig in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the events of which recur in conversation here.) Might Marty's rise to prominence also be a lauded writer-director's mid-career reflection on what he too has been through to arrive at this point: the getting of wisdom, the making of deals and compromises, covering ground with holes in your shoes and pockets, the unlikely successes, the crushing failures, the constant risk of abject humiliation? The Safdies have so far treated filmmaking as a kind of extreme sport: moving beyond the genteel suburban skateboarding of the more moneyed Spike Jonze/Mike Mills generation, they've instead pushed for the thrills and spills traditionally associated with parkour, encouraging their desperate protagonists to run across the rooftops in pursuit of what they want, and sending a similarly breathless camera after them. The dangers are inbuilt, and self-reflexive: Good Time was people trying to get away with something before the cops arrive, while the events of Uncut Gems were a bet the filmmakers were placing on their own raggedly athletic technique. In Safdieland, everything's a gamble; everything's a flutter and a-flutter.

The new film looks and feels like an attempt to do everything the brothers have done before, only singlehandedly and on a far grander scale. Marty's ambition matches his creators' ambition, and indeed the ambition of the upwardly mobile boutique studio (A24) whose logo adorns all the cheques. "Dream big" is both the film's slogan and the production's watchwords; Safdie's clinging to that old adage "go broke or go home", while addending that arms and legs can also be broken. So we get stars: new money in Chalamet, now a draw in himself, and the more seasoned currency of Gwyneth Paltrow, WASPily elegant as the faded Hollywood star Marty pursues and - in another unlikely triumph - woos. Yet A24 allow a certain artistic continuity to persist that you sense would be beyond the pale at any bigger studio. The bulk of the HR budget has gone on supporting players with asymmetrical faces, gapped teeth, milk-bottle specs, and raspy or wheezy voices; part of Safdie's project has apparently been to round up the most abrasive performers and personalities of his lifetime (Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard, Penn Jillette, Abel Ferrara, Odessa A'Zion) and stick them all in the same two-and-a-half-hour grouchfest. In flushing out the casting rooms and trawling the backalleys and after-hours bars of American culture, he's managed to scuzz up, uglify and reroute (or otherwise complicate) the period drama: to Safdiefy it, if we're giving the process a name. That's not a bad idea on which to found a movie, and it more often than not pays off during Marty Supreme's first two-thirds: cramming so much fractious life into each shot, setting these actors to rub up against the confines of each set-up and every frame, allows this slight story to expand a little before our eyes. (Safdie loves a straggler, and he loves leaving in straggly adlibs and other bits of on-set business that neater, tidier films would redact: that's why it runs 150 minutes.)

At the film's centre, though, there bounces a human ping-pong ball: someone who can't possibly stand for anything much, because he won't sit still for a moment. Nothing here caused me to discard my working theory that Timmy Caramel will only ever be effective when cast as brats, dicks, shits or twits (his heelturn in Lady Bird being the highpoint so far). The good news is that Marty Mauser is all of the above, and a grifter and tryhard besides: the movie makes sense of its own promotional campaign and how its leading man has ended up dating Kylie Jenner. Chalamet leans into the brattishness: Marty talks back to his ma, mouths off to everybody else, and says things that would very likely get a public figure cancelled today. Safdie's screenfilling close-ups of the actor, meanwhile, reveal dead eyes, pitted skin, a bumfluff moustache: he's been Safdiefied, too, as if this camera were its own, unflattering kind of Instagram filter. There's something very funny about Marty Mauser's near-complete lack of humour - if he does stand for something, it's that pure, untrammelled ambition you see in those who'd do anything to reach the top of their chosen field - and you can't take your eyes off him, if only to ensure this twerp isn't making off with your wallet. He's also, finally, a pretty hollow creation: slice him in two and you'd find no psychological baggage and just the one needling note, played with skill up until the point a young star can no longer sustain it. (It's as much an endurance test for Chalamet as it is for us.) In this respect, Marty Mauser is not unlike Marty Supreme: the longer it ran on, the more I felt Safdie coming to rely on his counterintuitive Eighties soundtrack (Tears for Fears, Alphaville, PiL: musical abrasion, rubbing history up the wrong way) to lend the action whatever warmth and depth of feeling it has. Like its protagonist - and like many other Safdie movies - Marty Supreme is finally a headache and a pain in the arse; it falls somewhere between a lot, too much and not nearly enough, hoping all this motion can foster the illusion of substance and profundity. It's experiential to the point of not really having a tale to tell - it's another of 2025's one-battle-after-another movies - and I cannot imagine a less gentle start to the New Year; yet I can't deny this is a movie, and more movie than most. In a way Marty Mauser, hustler supreme, would doubtless appreciate, Safdie sure gives us our money's worth - but also perhaps a bellyful.

Marty Supreme is now playing in cinemas nationwide.