Full Metal Racket

Ticket Stubs #15: Timothée Chalamet serves up ace after ace in “Marty Supreme”.

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #15.

Marty Supreme

Josh Safdie, 2025

Let’s get it out of the way.

Yes, this is the movie where Timothée Chalamet gets his bare ass spanked with a ping-pong paddle. Yes, it’s really his ass. Yes, it’s a real spanking. Those cheeks deserve an Oscar all of their own because the lad has clearly been getting his squats in.

Marty Supreme, loosely based on the colourful career of Marty Reisman, has been marketed to all hell off the back of this scene, and if it gets bums on seats, presumably sitting more comfortably than Chalamet after his run-in with that wooden bat, that’s all to the good because this is a compulsively watchable performance from an actor who gives everything to the role.

Marty Mauser is a cocky little shit, a shoe store clerk in 1950s New York City who goes through words like John Wick goes through ammunition. He doesn’t talk; he spits out syllables, pew-pew-pew-pew, his mouth gunning down every obstacle that stands between him and his dream.

That dream is to become world ping-pong champion, and if that seems lame wait till you watch the sequences in which Marty steps up to the table to do battle. Josh Safdie directs in a style that will be familiar to anyone who saw Uncut Gems (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2019) or anyone who has ever suffered an anxiety attack. The tension is unbearable, the mood ever-escalating so that we can never quite relax. The score is high-strung, the editing splenetic; Safdie puts you on edge over table tennis.

Forget tie-in popcorn buckets, every ticket for Marty Supreme should come with a blood pressure monitor.

Nothing in this movie is as intense as Chalamet’s insistent, nervy performance. He is constantly on the move, darting around a Fifties-era Lower East Side begging, borrowing, and stealing to secure his passage to the ping-pong world championships in Tokyo. Marty is afraid of no one, not the cops trying to arrest him, not his girlfriend’s heavy-handed husband, not the aging hardman he double crosses, and not the dog-napping loner with a shotgun. His only fear is mediocrity.

He can hustle, he can lie, he can lose, but he must never settle. Chalamet, a wiry-framed pretty boy, is not an obvious choice to play a post-woke recalibration of Hollywood masculinity, but that is what Marty represents: charming, driven, ruthless, adventure-seeking, evading women’s attempts to tie him down, but taking responsibility in the end.

Marty Supreme is the movie that makes male heroism and masculine glory acceptable again. (The Guardian says we can disapprove of all this toxic masculinity and still enjoy the movie, because that’s something Guardian readers have to be told. How did these people get through Citizen Kane?)

The picture is also an allegory for the Jewish experience in the twentieth century and the endurance of the Jews across the centuries.

Marty embodies the burdens of chosenness (an early press notice in the Daily Mail is headlined ‘The Chosen One?’), his avocation bringing him more scorn and suffering than worldly rewards, and yet his dedication to the rules of the sport and the ethics of his conscience — analogous, you might say, to the Law and Buber’s ‘court within the soul’ — drives him to persist, to achieve, to survive.

A lot of characters are trying to survive here, from Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), the baby mama who fakes a black eye so Marty will take care of her, to Ezra Mishkin (Abel Ferrara), an elderly criminal who will do anything to recover his stolen dog, Moses, but Marty’s struggle feels existential. Ping pong is his oxygen.

Hollywood has never figured out what to do with Jews like Marty Mauser. Tough, assertive Jews are fine when it’s a Biblical figure in a swords-and-sandals epic but modern Jews must be self-deprecating intellectuals, earnest idealists, quippy comedians, or stock archetypes like the overbearing mother or the liberal lawyer.

Brash and ballsy Jews, athletic and sexually confident Jews, Jews who fuck your wife and fuck you up — Jews like Marty Mauser — are harder to place. These Jews make many uncomfortable, and not just gentiles. The movie is set in the wake of the Shoah, yet Marty speaks of the near-obliteration of his people in blithe, outrageous terms. Of one opponent, a concentration camp survivor called Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig), he tells journalists: ‘I’m going to do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t.’

Incidentally, Kletzki provides the most disturbing image in the movie when he recalls smearing his body in illicitly-acquired honey and allowing fellow prisoners to lick rare sustenance from him. (This scene is based on a true story.) Marty speaks very little about Judaism or his Jewishness but he is a proud son of Abraham. He brings his mother a hunk of rock chiseled off an Egyptian pyramid, adding: ‘We built this.’

And in the final match of the movie, when he chooses to stop being humiliated by smug, WASPy pen tycoon Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), his malefactor benefactor, the magen david around his neck slips out through his shirt, a reminder that there is a dignity higher than fame or fortune: ‘Even in poverty a Jew is a prince/ Whether slave or tramp/ You have been created the son of kings/ Crowned with the diadem of David.’

That’s why those who criticise the ending as out of character or a soppy tying up of loose ends are wrong. Marty is a winner and for a Jew in the 1950s, a newborn baby is perhaps the greatest triumph of all.

It’s good to see Gwyneth Paltrow again as Kay Stone, faded actress and unsatisfied wife of Rockwell, though I would have liked to have seen more of her. Speaking of Rockwell, he is played not by a professional actor but by Kevin O’Leary, an abrasive Canadian businessman in the mould of Donald Trump. Some thought casting him was a mistake but he is convincing as the douchey megabucks who enjoys imparting banal life lessons. Quite unexpectedly, I found myself wanting to see him in more things.

One bit part truly captured my heart and that was Abel Ferrara as Mishkin. Ferrara is mainly a director and if you’re a fan of 1980s exploitation movies or movies about pre-Giuliani New York City you will be familiar with landmark Ferrara titles like ‘video nasty’ The Driller Killer (1979), Zoë Lund-starring rape-revenge flick Ms .45 (1981), noirish vice thriller Fear City (1984), Christopher Walken crime drama King of New York (1990), and his masterpiece Bad Lieutenant (1992).

He has a dozen or so acting credits to his name, often in his own movies, and previously worked with Josh Safdie and his brother Benny in 2009’s Daddy Longlegs, and his turn in Marty Supreme is enigmatic and menacing. He’s obviously not a good guy but I wanted to know what kind of not-good guy he was. Between his gritty performance and the screenplay’s guardedness about his background, I’m left wishing there was a biopic about the life and times of Mishkin.

Let’s finish where we began: Timothée Chalamet’s tush. I’ve seen a few theories about the spanking scene and its narrative or thematic purpose, most detecting a critique of capitalism and its exploitative ways.

Film critics are a pretty commie lot; they think everything’s an allegory about ‘late capitalism’. (The socialist writer Deborah Orr once remarked: ‘How quaint it is that we used to call the phase of capitalism that was dominated by the supremacy of Western interests “late capitalism”. Already it is obvious that this was, so to speak, a little bit previous. Capitalism is only now getting into gear…’)

My theory is no great break with the Marxist reading, it’s just more specific: the paddling is about Hollywood and the creative process. Marty is a talent, a genius, and yet he must beg this soulless businessman with no talent beyond flogging pens for the air fare to travel to the Tokyo championships. He allows himself to be stripped of his dignity because the only other choice is giving up and going back to his old job as a shoe salesman.

The parallels with financing a movie are obvious, with the talent (the director) having to hand over creative control of his picture to a vulgarian with all the money in the world and not a smidgen of taste or creativity or human insight. Marty Supreme is a movie about the burden of excellence in a world that does not understand it and tends to resent it.

In cinemas now.