'Marty Supreme' review: Timothée Chalamet gives career-best performance as driven Ping-Pong player

Marty Mauser looks like a harmless sort with his skinny arms, wire-rimmed glasses and peach-fuzz mustache, but he’ll do anything to get what he wants — betray a friend, rob the woman he’s sleeping with, threaten to shoot a co-worker, you name it. How does he justify it?

"I have a purpose," Marty tells his weeping girlfriend before walking out on her. "You don’t."

Marty’s purpose is Ping-Pong, which in 1952 is considered little more than a pastime and certainly not a sport. But the desperate hero of Josh Safdie’s "Marty Supreme" sees a future in which he’s playing to sold-out crowds. Marty, inspired by the real-life champ Marty Reisman, is on a mission to get to Japan for a major tournament. And as played by Timothée Chalamet in a career-best performance, he drags us by the collar into every rash decision, dangerous scheme and public humiliation necessary to get there.

Robbing the shoe store where he works for his uncle is just the start. In London, he somehow works his oily charm on the aging actress Kay Stone (a vulnerable Gwyneth Paltrow, ending her roughly five-year acting hiatus). She happens to be married to the wealthy Milton Rockwell (an excellent Kevin O’Leary, of TV’s "Shark Tank"), who might fund Marty’s trip to Japan. The plan: a grudge match against the deaf and supernaturally gifted Japanese player Koto Endo (played by Koto Kawaguchi, himself a deaf Ping-Pong champ). One fly in the ointment is that weepy girlfriend, Rachel (an earthy and touching Odessa A'zion). Alas, she’s pregnant.

"Marty Supreme" looks terrific and thrums with energy thanks to director and co-writer Josh Safdie. (He and his brother Benny made 2019’s harrowing "Uncut Gems" before splitting up; Benny directed this year’s "The Smashing Machine," starring Dwayne Johnson.) Production designer Jack Fisk and cinematographer Darius Khondji make every set look like a world, from the grimy Lower East Side where Marty lives to the gleaming Japan of his dreams. The cast is dotted with unexpected names, including David Mamet, Pico Ayer, Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara and a rather good Tyler, The Creator as Marty’s con-artist friend Wally. The score by electronic auteur Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) is otherworldly but unobtrusive, even if the anachronistic 1980s soundtrack (New Order, Tears for Fears) seems to be making an unclear statement. Through it all, Chalamet endears us to the sociopathic, visionary Marty; just watching him stomp down a Paris sidewalk, furious and focused, is hugely entertaining.

Marty thinks he’ll find redemption in Japan. His climactic showdown with Endo, a sweat-soaked blur of motion, is one of the film’s best sequences — exactly the kind of nail-biter that sports movies are made of. But it’s the unexpectedly moving epilogue that makes "Marty Supreme" feel like something more than just a massive shot of adrenaline. The movie has a pulse, yes, but it also has a heart.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com