"Marty Supreme" Review: God Damn It, Chalamet

The actor of his generation anchors Josh Safdie's latest offering with undeniable charisma.

January 23, 2026

Prior to the 1934 MLB season, St. Louis Cardinals’ star pitcher Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean, fresh off a 20-win campaign, boldly predicted that he and his brother, Paul, would win 45 games between them. Dean was cocky, always happy to inform the press that he was one of the best pitchers in the game.

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As the season progressed, Dean won at an astonishing rate. On August 7, he won his 20th game for the second year in a row, shutting out the Cincinnati Reds. On September 30, the last day of the season, he shut them out again, winning his 30th game and clinching the National League pennant for St. Louis. For his part, Paul won 19 games. The brothers totaled 49 victories, four more than Dizzy guaranteed. Defending his hubris, Dean uttered one of professional sports’ most beloved quips:

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“If ya done it, it ain’t braggin’.”

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It’s annoying how, at his best, Timothée Chalamet mesmerizes. During last year’s awards season, he frequently expressed his desire to win awards and be ranked among the greats. Some found it refreshing to hear an actor speak so frankly about their longing for recognition, but many saw it as a crack in his good boy public image. If dating a Kardashian wasn’t damning enough, now he was practically begging for an Oscar.

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With his latest movie, Marty Supreme, for which he is all but guaranteed the Oscar, Chalamet has crossed the line. What was initially subjective has become inescapably objective: the man is high on his own supply, insistent on his greatness, and will spend the rest of his days with his head firmly planted up his own backside.

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Fans will chastise the detractors for simply not seeing his aggressive Oscars campaign for the art-imitating-life parallelism it truly is, and are foolishly falling for a marketing ploy. Sadly, this is more the culmination of what had been resting on the horizon for the last few years, but those growing tired of Chalamet overexposure and his increasingly grating public persona have no choice but to accept his self-aggrandizement because, as Dizzy Dean said…

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“If ya done it, it ain’t braggin’.”

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Does Chalamet entirely carry Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s new movie about a narcissistic table tennis world champion hopeful whose mania causes as many lows in his personal life as highs with the paddle? No, though it’s horrifically paced and unbearably long, as though Josh Safdie has joined the seemingly endless parade of filmmakers who believe that, in lieu of an ark, they can spare the species of Earth from God’s inimitable wrath by cramming every single idea they have into their movies.

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The film begins in unorthodox fashion, with New York shoe salesman Marty already near the top of his chosen ambition. He’s not an upstart; his story isn’t one of someone lowly or green getting discovered by a savior and developed into a star. He discovered himself, but only enough to be the second-best table tennis player in the world, not to be a decent human being who doesn’t leave endless destruction in his wake.

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In relaying this, we encounter his childhood friend, Rachel, with whom he’s having an affair despite her (admittedly troubled) marriage. He seems to have no genuine regard for her and carries on with his seduction of a former movie star, Kay. He robs his uncle’s store at gunpoint, ropes his friends into schemes that end in violence, steals from an old man he recklessly injures, takes his dog and loses it, and has zero issue manipulating everyone in his life to suit his needs.

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Did we need to see every possible thread of each of these situations explored to get the point across? No, and by the time the movie circles back to the Rachel relationship for the umpteenth time, the movie has gone on so long that we don’t care about her or her ultimate role. Frankly, we’re waiting for the movie to be over. Arguably, the constant revisiting of so many characters and plot points is emblematic of the chaos Marty brings and the hecticness of his life, but simply because there’s a point doesn’t make it a good one.

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As Marty Supreme loses its focus and becomes an exercise in diminishing returns, we are held to our seats by several things to varying degrees. Although Rachel is limited and morally bankrupt in her own right, Odessa A’zion is fantastic. The film’s musical anachronisms keep things fresh and exciting, compounding the sense of urgency that Marty’s self-indulgent lunacy creates. Along with the soundtrack selections (even if “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is eye-rollingly on the nose), the score is subtly electrifying and overflows with ‘80s nostalgia. Visually, it’s dark and cinematic but never suffocatingly so; Marty’s story is always underscored by his narcissism, but it remains aesthetically light enough for the movie - and its protagonist - to not feel self-important.

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But no matter how many laughs it draws or expertly choreographed table tennis matches it delivers, the movie is Chalamet’s. Few words can convey how completely he can own a movie screen, in this case, disallowing us from forming a succinct, comfortable conclusion about Marty. He’s opportunistic, shameless, rude, abrupt, exploitative, callous, manipulative, deceitful, and egomaniacal. He’s also, at times, bizarrely generous, kind, perversely genuine, and caring.

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You’re never certain the moments he’s seemingly compassionate are genuine, like when a heavily pregnant Rachel breaks down after he refuses to believe his pull-out game failed him during one of their many unprotected rendezvous. He immediately responds to her emotional output, apologizes, and embraces her. After he steals a necklace from Kay, believing it to be real diamonds, he tries to pawn it to fund his trip to Japan for the 1953 World Championships. The pawn broker reveals that it’s costume jewelry and is worth nothing.

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Ever the opportunist, Marty goes to Kay’s dressing room to return it, claiming he swiped it during their sexual encounter, but didn’t have the conscience to steal from her. Kay calls him out and correctly states that he tried to pawn it but was unsuccessful. She knows Marty is full of it. We know Marty is full of it, but deep down, part of us wonders if maybe, just maybe, he isn’t completely full of it. Even if he’s spinning a story, and you know he knows he’s spinning a story, you feel as though, on some level, he actually believes himself, if he convinces himself in the moment that the lies are true even a little, and that self-delusion creates his bothersome indignance.

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In real life, we see people weave their way in and out of people’s lives with ease, taking what they will, leaving what they wish, and somehow getting away with it time and time again. We ask ourselves what people see in them, why they get away with so much, why no one ever tires of their nonsense and rids themselves of them entirely. Well, Marty Supreme is our answer, or, more accurately, Timothée Chalamet is our answer.

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A great writer can do wonders for an idea. Directors influence the outcome, of course, but how a writer develops ideas, concepts, and characters defines a movie perhaps more than anything else. Is it fair to minimize Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, who created Marty’s, shall we say, eccentricities? No, but the reality is that Chalamet takes a character that would’ve gone catastrophically wrong in the hands of maybe any actor of his generation and makes him one of the most infuriatingly infectious protagonists in recent memory, perhaps ever. He isn’t charming, but he’s insistent, so you almost feel charmed. You don’t like him, but you do. You hate him, but you don’t. You want him to fail, but because you want him to feel like one of us for a change. Yet, when he succeeds, that’s when he’s humble, so you want him to win. The machine operator of this rollercoaster ride is Chalamet, and he navigates his job with the most scatter-brained precision a performance has ever been given.

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Chalamet has made a spectacle of his self-perceived magnificence. It would appear that in his mind, he’s the straw that stirs the drink, the creme de la creme, the king of the hill. It’s nauseating, and the further we get from what seemed like a grounded upstart, the more difficult putting up with his self-aggrandizement becomes. Yet, we cannot deny that, at his best (meaning not inflicting his one-octave vocal range on us), he is, without question, the talent of his generation, and no one comes remotely close. He has lapped the field with such ease that we have no choice but to accept that the man comes as he advertises himself.

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Marty Supreme is a good movie with many technically proficient qualities. It is also a flawed production that needed fine-tuning. It is also a formality to acknowledge any of it, because the only real reason to remember Marty Supreme is that it is the movie that will give a generational talent a well-deserved first Oscar. Hate it if you will, decry it if you must, but Chalamet is among the upper echelon of shameless self-promoters, like Muhammad Ali, Charles Barkley, and, of course, Dizzy Dean, because when push comes to shove, if ya done it, it ain’t braggin’.