Marty Supreme is a film that refuses to talk about failure. It prefers to linger in that weird in-between space of the “nearly-making-it.” Nearly winning, nearly being recognized, nearly getting out of debt, nearly being taken seriously. With that in mind, nearly three hours pass by — faster than you’d think, if I may say —while the film paints a portrait of a character whose main struggle isn’t a lack of talent, but the structural impossibility of turning merit into anything that lasts.

A nearly biopic

Though inspired by the life of Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme isn’t a biopic. Honestly, it barely started as one. Sara Rossein, Josh Safdie’s wife, stumbled on The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler in a thrift store and gave it to him as a gift. He later passed it to his friend Ronald Bronstein, and from there, the two built something totally different: a reimagined story in the same chaotic, competitive, slightly underground world of professional table tennis.

The story is set in the United States of the 1950s, and follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a young New Yorker raised by a single mom in a Lower East Side tenement. Marty bets everything on an unlikely career as a professional player, and here’s where the screenplay really shines: one of the film’s biggest strengths is how it structures the story around a fine imposed after a tournament scandal.

That unresolved fine drives nearly every choice Marty makes, such as improvised bets, humiliating deals, and morally sketchy calls. Marty is always paying for something, even when he doesn’t exactly know what it is.

Dreaming Big as an act of resistance

It’s no coincidence that Safdie, Bronstein, and Chalamet are Jewish, just like Reisman and the fictional Marty. The film leans on that shared experience to touch — without preaching— on a long-standing stereotype: Jews and money. But Marty Supreme subverts it. Marty’s ambition isn’t about control or mastery, once money never really belongs to him. It’s always late, conditional, on the verge of slipping away.

This feeling runs through the whole film. There’s always a missed deadline, a rule changing mid-game, some bureaucratic thing undoing what was just earned. Time acts like a merciless judge. The film seems to say: it’s not enough to “get there”. You have to get there at the right moment, with the right resources, in the right system. Marty does win. The talent is real. But nothing sticks. Success shows up crooked, out of sync, or too late to matter. Victory exists, but it doesn’t count. What’s left is this lingering sense of inadequacy, of always being late to your own life.

There’s something quite cruel in that logic, and the film knows it. Watching Marty Supreme is like watching a cursed King Midas: everything he touches nearly turns to gold, yet keeps falling short. Behind a relentless pursuit of greatness, Marty Mauser represents, at its core, a desperate attempt to survive in a morally broken society. Dreaming Big, in this case, isn’t just ambition, but a way to survive.

Table tennis makes it all clear. Fast, technical, undervalued, nearly invisible if you’re not paying attention. Just like Marty. A legitimate talent treated as disposable, negotiable, replaceable. What’s at stake is never just losing a match, but the constant reminder of a social spot he already occupies long before he even steps in the arena.

Too close to win

Timothée Chalamet carries all this discomfort like a pro. A New Yorker, strategic, openly ambitious performer, he seems to know exactly what he’s doing. There’s this constant push to take up space, insist, be seen. And yes, he’s been yearning for an Oscar for a while, but can we blame him? His performance is physically restless, sometimes irritating, deliberately excessive, as if the character’s body itself has to insist just to avoid being erased.

The other characters, meanwhile, seem most background, nearly opaque. But that imbalance works less as a flaw and more as a symptom. Safdie’s Marty is trapped in a cycle where recognition always arrives too late. Maybe Marty takes up too much space because the world refuses to give him any.

In the end, Marty Supreme is a strange, slightly unsettling fable about losing even when you win. About nearly reaching success and still walking away in debt. Nothing explodes. Nothing gets settled. The film lives in that uncomfortable territory of nearly making it. Too close to be ignored, too far to be legitimized by a system that only recognizes those who start miles ahead. This film is about ambition, yes. But more than that, it’s about the exhaustion of living permanently on the edge of validation.

Marty Supreme is playing in theaters worldwide. Watch the trailer below: