EVERYTHING SUPREME

TIMOTHEE CHALAMET CREATES SPORTS ROCKSTAR FOR FANTASTICAL BIOPIC

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The inside-out day-in-the-life of a world class table tennis champion could not have been more exciting.

Director Josh Safdie, with co-writer Ronald Bronstein, blend film genres to create a highly stylized sports biopic, thereby sparing Timothee Chalamet from having to endlessly rehearse tightly choreographed games of ping pong.

Chalamet addresses the challenge by creating a three dimensional character for the leading role in Marty Supreme (2025)

Marty is part hustler, part New Yorker street huckster and part of the early trend toward sports rockstars wanting to turn his American table tennis championship win into a global success story by winning the world championships in London.

The New York City of 1952 is recreated with tight camera shots on unique set designs filled with antique props to the point of clutter. And the set lighting is perfect.

The hustle involves a lot of fast paced set changes and short introductions to a supporting cast of characters that often get turned into side stories from the main narrative.

Marty is definitely talented enough, but he lacks the finances to concentrate all his efforts on the sport. Part of the script gets into what the rising sports star has to do to survive and get ahead in the city.

Chalamet shows that the part of Marty’s personality that is so well suited for the fast pace kinetic game of table tennis also gets him into a lot of scenarios that may or may not be beneficial.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays a sliver of her real self who becomes trapped in one of those side hustles. Paltrow, as Kay Stone, is introduced as a retired Hollywood movie star who has married wealthy American business person, Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary.

O’Leary also plays a sliver of himself, as a business magnet who can influence the outcomes of others through investments and sponsorship.

Marty does get to London to play in the world championships only to lose in the final. The narrative has just begun though, after all the introductions. The main narrative begins once Marty has returned to New York, finding himself having to hustle his way back to the world championships in Tokyo the following year.

Table tennis becomes the back story of sorts as the camera follows Marty down the New York City rabbit hole with just about everything else in his life going wrong in a way that makes getting back to the top all the more difficult.

A dynamic score is used to build suspense. Daniel Lopatin recreates the intensity of the game, even when the scene is about a piece of the backstory.

And the camera compels the scenes a bit by not answering all the questions all at once.

Odessa A’zio, for example, plays the obligated sports biopic love interest, but her character, Rachel, has a changing profile throughout the narrative that is incrementally revealed in greater detail.

Rachel is initially introduced as being head over heals in love with Marty, but she quickly slips into the backstory as Marty must keep the main goal of winning the world championships in focus.

Rachel returns later in the film to make further disclosures, but the new information is inevitably not the only thing in the way of Marty’s plans of winning in Tokyo.

Marty again has insufficient funds to make the transcontinental trip – and this financial situation gets him into all sorts of uncomfortable predicaments, with the other characters, that he cannot control nearly as well as the ping pong ball.

Chalamet taps into a lot of his acting powers – combining a Willy Wonka with a young King Henry V, and then throwing in a lot of contemporary New York City madness to create an entirely new film character.

Marty seems to have a pop-culture form of Tourettes Syndrome that compels him to insult people who have more power at the table than he does. Kevin O’Leary must tap into all his acting powers for his character to overcome the insult and plot a bit of on-the-spot retaliation.

Paltrow and O’Leary are in several scenes both as individuals and as a couple, while their characters interact with Marty. Marty is not necessarily disingenuous, but he always tries to get something out of the exchanges.

For Marty, everything leads to the championships, even the most humiliating steps he has to take to achieve his goals.

The film is often too fantastical to be believed as a true story, although always delightfully entertaining, with more frequent funny moments later on as the director builds momentum for the reversal scenes.

One possibility is that the backstories have been fictionalized for the sake of drama, or in the alternative, the real Marty had a vivid imagination rooted in that sports rockstar lifestyle.

Nevertheless, the runtime of 2h 30m goes by like a ping pong ball hit back and forth in a table tennis game, that’s just how entertaining everything is despite the fantastical nature of certain side shows.