Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is doing excellent business and inspiring great reviews. It looks like it’s going to be a triumph for A24, which gambled $70 million on this oddball comedy-drama about a working-class ping-pong prodigy named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) hustling to finance his trip to big overseas tournaments by any means necessary.

It was no doubt helped along by a surge of holiday moviegoing that also boosted an eclectic range of new releases including Avatar: Fire and Ash, Song Sung Blue, and Anaconda. But Marty Supreme is arguably the hardest sell of all of them, and enthusiastic word of mouth is really helping it along. The film boasts a colorful script by Safdie and favorite cowriter Ronald Bronstein. They also edited the film together, setting a rapid-fire, nerve-jangling pace. It’s got exciting ping-pong competitions along with edgy performances by Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, the Creator), Abel Ferrara, and Fran Drescher, superbly grubby cinematography by Darius Khondji (Eddington, Mickey 17, Uncut Gems), a wildly eclectic and anachronistic score by Daniel Lopatin, and a wonderfully low-down production design, especially in its representation of 1950s New York City, by Jack Fisk, whose collaborations with Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese have made him an eighty-year-old legend in his field.

Everyone agrees the movie’s an end-of-the-year must-see. I disliked it intensely, but there’s no denying that it’s a must-see.

Why did I dislike Marty Supreme, this film I ought to like so much, made by people of tremendous talent? This film that’s all about lower-class struggle against impossible odds in a world designed to thwart working people at every turn, which is practically my biggest obsession? I’ve been wrestling with this very question for days.

But first, let me tell you more about the film.

Marty Supreme is loosely based on the eccentric life of Marty Reisman, who really was an American ping-pong champ in a country that cared almost nothing about ping-pong. He had to go to Asia, Europe, and the UK, where the sport was growing fast right after World War II, in order to play in major tournaments. Financing his participation in this sport required considerable ingenuity on his part. One of many ways he raised money — which we see in the film — was hustling people in ping-pong parlors in NYC, pretty much the only city that had them at the time. Ping-pong in America — or table tennis, if you want to use its more dignified name — was relegated to patios, garages, and basement rec rooms.

In the film, Marty starts off as a reluctant shoe salesman whose uncle Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) runs the store and is trying everything, fair means or foul, to hang on to Marty, his best mover of merchandise, including withholding the $700 Marty needs to make it to London for the British Open. But Marty only took the shoe store job temporarily to raise the money necessary to play in overseas tournaments. In this endeavor, he’s also frustrated by his clingy mother (Fran Drescher); his married girlfriend, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who says she’s pregnant with his child; and the various monied people he hits up who won’t fund him except on the most punitive terms.

As a result of all the obstacles put in his way, Marty resorts to ever more desperate gambits such as “robbing” the shoe store safe. Once at the British Open, his ping-pong skills are so tremendous he seems on the cusp of fulfilling all his dreams: he defeats the defending champion, Béla Kletski (Géza Röhrig), he beds the aging and aloof movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), he makes the potentially lucrative acquaintance of her rich businessman husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), and he does it all while staying at the upscale Royal Suites, an outrageous luxury he tries to charge to the management running the British Open.

Then things go badly awry when Marty faces up against the Japanese ping-pong champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), who plays a devastating game with a sponge paddle that stymies Marty’s usual brilliance.

Why doesn’t Marty stick around the UK or go to Europe or Asia where he could make money as one of the hottest new contenders on the scene? It’s how the real-life Marty Reisman financed his career, which endured from the 1950s all the way to 1997, when, at age 67, he became the oldest player to win a national championship in a racket sport. But in this film, you just have to accept a number of developments that defy logic. Apparently only the first-prize winner could possibly benefit financially from the British Open, so Marty goes home in abject defeat.

Returning home broke, owing $1,500 to pay for the room at the Royal Suites, facing criminal charges brought by his Uncle Murray for stealing his own $700 out of the store safe, and pressured by Rachel to save her from what she says is an abusive marriage, Marty goes on the run in a NYC odyssey of desperate scams, bad scrapes, and dangerous encounters. Marty’s laser focus on fulfilling his own talent and making enough money to go to Tokyo for the World Championship and a rematch with Koto Endo begins to dissipate under crazy-making pressure from all sides.

Sounds good, right? Marty Supreme is one of those wild American tall tales that aren’t even that tall, given how hard it is for anyone but the rich to pursue their dreams here.

But somehow, from the very beginning, I couldn’t get into it.

For starters, the whole film hangs on the performance and charisma of Timothée Chalamet. He’s a gifted actor, certainly, and he trained for years to become a ping-pong ace so he could play the role. His own look of intense self-love and general attitude of superiority are so irritating, he has no trouble playing skinny egomaniacs like young Bob Dylan and Marty Mauser — he’s practically typecast as the abrasive Marty.

What’s harder to accept is the way so many others in the film are also taken in by Marty, in love with Marty, scammed by Marty, seduced by Marty, readily coerced by Marty. Marty’s a bespectacled, nerdy, rail-thin, acne-scarred, fast-talking, self-obsessed opportunist who looks and acts just like what he is. He takes nasty advantage of family and friends and everyone who helps him because he’s convinced he has some higher purpose in life, which is becoming a ping-pong champ.

Somehow the thinly drawn female characters are all strangely enthralled by him. Fran Drescher, playing his mother, barely has any dialogue after her initial scene feeding lines to a friend who’s trying to persuade Marty over the phone to come home because his mother’s supposedly ill. We’re given to understand, by what Marty says, that her smothering scams in trying to get his attention contribute to his own scamming ways as well as making him hate the domestic trap he thinks Rachel is laying for him — but we just don’t see it. From that early scene on, if we see her at all, his mother is a silent figure who occasionally makes a pleading or reproving face at him.

Marty treats Rachel, his childhood friend who’s carrying his child, with tremendous cruelty, and she remains dedicated to him through many dangerous misadventures. The only apparent reason is that her other options are even worse.

And still glamorous movie star Kay Stone succumbs repeatedly to Marty’s dubious charms. Why? God only knows. She’s very unhappily married, but she must be able to do better than Marty any day of the week. There’s a What Makes Sammy Run? sensibility vaguely operating here. In that famous novel, an impoverished working-class Jewish outsider ruthlessly climbs to the top of the Hollywood tree, scamming and betraying all the way, bedding beautiful women as he goes, because his chaotic energy and status as a forbidden Other is what makes him perversely attractive to WASP insiders. Which is an interesting plotline, but it’s not fleshed out in this film.

Marty deploys his Jewishness in shocking, scattershot statements to the press, such as when he declares that he’ll beat the reigning ping-pong champ, a concentration camp survivor, by saying, “I’m going to finish what the Holocaust started. I’m allowed to say that, I’m Jewish.” He also announces, “I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare, because I’m here.”

The fallout from WWII is also evident in Marty’s matchups with Koto Endo, whose apparently unbeatable skills in ping-pong have made him the first Japanese champion in any sport since the war began. Thus he’s a national hero, with the burden of his country’s hopes pinned on him as he goes up against Marty.

He has no dialogue whatsoever. It’s noted by another character that he’s deaf, and presumably there’s a language barrier, but why he’s given almost no hint of interiority in stoically facing Marty across the table in two crucial matches, I have no idea. I was rooting for him throughout.

There’s an ain’t-it-cool tone to Marty Supreme that gets harder to take as it builds in relentlessly paced, increasingly bloody encounters. Is it cool, though? Soundtrack songs like Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch,” and New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss” are there to tell us it is. Yet I had some inchoate sense throughout the film that this was an upper-class view of the lower classes, a lurid fascination with the scabrous lower depths — so insidious, so scammy, yet ultimately so sentimental and comically inept, they can’t pull off their uppity attempts to crash the gates of the elite. You’d never guess from watching the end of this movie that the real Marty Reisman pulled it off, and pulled it off big-time — becoming a millionaire several times over, though he gambled his money away almost as fast as he earned it.

But Marty Supreme is so filled with distractions, it’s hard to keep one’s focus on its handling of class. This is the kind of film, for example, that’s loaded with cameo performances by famous people, some professional actors, some not, for reasons that are not clear. Tugging pointlessly at you for attention are magician-entertainer Penn Jillette, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, playwright David Mamet, basketball player George Gervin, and actor-comedian Sandra Bernhard.

The most inexplicable and distracting element of the film is its sentimental framing dealing with procreation. None of the critics who love this film seem to have anything to say about this confounding frame, good or bad.

I suppose now it’s time to issue a SPOILER ALERT: Marty Supreme opens with sperm penetrating egg as, presumably, Rachel’s pregnancy commences. It ends with Marty, battered by his many ping-pong-related trials, seeing his newborn baby, bursting into tears, and regarding the child with the awe of someone having a spiritual epiphany. It’s completely baffling. Why bracket this unlikely, hardscrabble, mean-edged, black-comic narrative with the miracle of birth?

At no point in the narrative has Marty evinced the least interest in the baby that Rachel’s carrying — quite the contrary, he’s actively hostile. And there’s virtually no indication that he’s capable of great gusts of feeling for anyone as he channels everything into his own angsty, hard-driven progress through the world. Yet the film ends on a gushy note, a totally unearned epiphany, that would be a bit much in a Lifetime TV-movie about an eagerly expectant dad.

Still, Marty Supreme is doing the job for viewers in undeniable ways. It’s already appeared on many critics’ best of 2025 lists and is sure to do well the upcoming awards season. I just have to chalk up my own antipathy to an unexpected clash that sometimes happens when class-conscious sensibilities collide.