Being insufferable is a talent, too: Timothée Chalamet runs wild in 'Marty Supreme' [Review]

Do not go in expecting a sports film. Just because Timothée Chalamet picks up a ping-pong paddle does not make "Marty Supreme" a simple table tennis movie. Opening July 1, the film is better described as the reckless sprint of a footloose young man chasing a pipe dream — one who digs himself into a hole faster than he can run toward it.

It is hard to remember the last time a film kept the mind this busy. The moment you think "please, just stop," the damage is already done. The moment you wonder whether he has finally come to his senses, the old habits come roaring back — bluster without foundation, bravado without limit, unshakeable self-belief with nothing to back it up. For the entire runtime, the audience is left breathless, chasing after this walking catastrophe. Infuriating, absurd, chaotic — and somehow impossible to look away from. "Marty Supreme" is exactly that kind of film.

New York, 1952. Marty (Timothée Chalamet) is a shoe salesman with an extraordinary gift for gab. His uncle, who runs the shop, recognizes the talent and offers him a management position — but Marty, a competitive table tennis player, turns it down flat, insisting he will enter the British Open and conquer the world. "I'm going to be a legend of American sports," he declares. Unimpressed by his nephew's groundless confidence, the uncle refuses to pay even the airfare. So Marty pulls a gun on a fellow salesman and boards a flight to England.

Once on the court, his confidence turns out to be more than hollow posturing. Marty wins match after match and reaches the final, where he faces Endo, a player from Japan — a country still living down its defeat in World War II. Yet the luxury hotel room he strong-armed out of tournament officials, on the grounds that a champion needs proper rest, counts for nothing: he cannot return a single one of Endo's serves and collapses in straight sets. Endo wins decisively. Marty's protest that his opponent used an illegal paddle is swallowed up by the roar of the crowd, and Endo — who has just lifted a former enemy nation to the top of the world — is celebrated as a national hero.

Marty, of course, does not stop. He scrapes together funds for the next world championship by performing a humiliating ping-pong comedy act during a halftime show for the Harlem Globetrotters. But the moment he returns home, his uncle and the police confiscate every cent over the earlier robbery, and he finds himself a fugitive. What he desperately needs now is $1,500 for entry fees and airfare to the World Table Tennis Championships in Tokyo.

He turns to his friend and taxi driver Wally (Tyler Okonma). It is here that Marty's true madness begins in earnest — eyes fixed on nothing but the title of world ping-pong champion.

The film, loosely inspired by legendary American table tennis player Marty Reisman, generated buzz off-screen even before its release, with lead actor Chalamet at the center of it. During the promotional campaign he drew criticism for remarks suggesting that nobody cares about opera or ballet anymore, and throughout awards season he displayed a frank, polarizing confidence about his own performances and career.

What makes this interesting is how neatly that off-screen image maps onto the character on screen. Marty's unshakeable belief that he is a "legend" and a "star player" rhymes strangely with Chalamet's real-world declaration that he "pursues greatness." Whether that overlap is a calculated move by one of Hollywood's biggest names is hard to say — but it does mean audiences slip into the character of the big-talking Marty without any sense of friction.

Whatever controversies surround the film, its greatest asset is Chalamet's performance. On screen, he does not play Marty so much as become him. Much of the film's pleasure comes from watching Marty's mania, arrogance and bluster run riot through Chalamet's face and body. The lies that industriously back him into a corner, the requests delivered with the entitlement of someone collecting a debt, the self-belief that has never once made contact with reality — Chalamet packs all of it together and assembles a complete human disaster named Marty. In this film at least, his claim to have delivered the performance of his life does not sound like empty self-congratulation.

Chalamet trained for six years to play Marty and handled a substantial portion of the match sequences himself. Even so, the table tennis scenes occupy less screen time than one might expect, and the film offers none of the stirring underdog-triumph narrative typical of sports movies. That much is clear from Marty's own priorities: a man who dreams of being world champion but spends far more time scrounging for airfare and entry fees than he ever does training. The director's real interest is not the ping-pong ball but Marty himself — and a life as unpredictable as a ball that could bounce anywhere.

The film never once moves in a predictable direction. A bathtub crashes through the floor to the apartment below; a gas station explodes out of nowhere; a search for a missing dog ends in a shotgun blast. One absurd incident closes, and a more absurd one immediately follows, each becoming the fuse for the next disaster. Like a runaway train with no brakes, the film hurtles forward without pause.

Marty's chaotic charge toward the championship only grows in scale. What is telling is that before all of it, and after all of it, the only thing he ever really wanted was enough money to get to the next tournament. For all his reckless methods, he remains impossible to truly hate — because the passion driving him is pure, aimed at nothing but the dream.

In another sense, Marty's story reads as a reflection of the American Dream in its postwar heyday — the idea, born in a land of abundance and optimism, that anyone could make it regardless of where they came from. Beneath the gleaming mythology of American success lay young men who had to sustain themselves on the belief that faith in oneself would bring money, and the conviction that success only meant something if talent alone carried you there.

The nation had boarded an express train of growth, yet a player dreaming of a world championship still had to find his own airfare — a detail that quietly exposes the gap between the ideal and the reality. That Marty is Jewish, carrying the weight of a long history of persecution, makes his obsession with success all the more convincing.

Through it all, Marty grows. That growth does not justify the chaos that produced it, and the film knows this — in its final stretch it drifts into somewhat more predictable territory, and the explosive energy of the opening gradually settles. But that is a small fraction of the whole.

A baby's cry over the closing credits conveys the stubborn vitality of a man who caused endless trouble and kept moving forward anyway. Right to the end, this is a film that refuses to let you hate it. Rated for audiences 15 and older, it opens July 1.