Embarrassment fears Timothée Chalamet. He’ll cosplay as Bob Dylan on the red carpet. He’ll Soulja Boy with Brittany Broski. He’ll make fun of himself in an Apple TV ad. He’ll self-fund bizarre table-tennis-themed performance art to promote his latest film, Marty Supreme. He’s obsessed with being “one of the greats,” as he explained in his SAG Awards speech last year. But Chalamet isn’t interested in following a conventional path to get there. His pre-fame digital footprint includes his high school rap alter ego “Lil’ Timmy Tim” and a musical theater comedy performance that would give Neil Patrick Harris a run for his money. Where most young Hollywood actors position themselves as either boyish matinee idols or brooding method actors, Chalamet is a nebbishy weirdo theater kid who’s managed to turn himself into a fashion-forward Gen-Z sex symbol.
It’s a quality that fuels his most memorable performances—an alien space prince, a lovestruck 19th-century boy next door, Willy Wonka. But, so far at least, he’s struggled to translate this sensibility to his “awards bait” films. Beautiful Boy, The King, and last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown are the sorts of roles any wiry young actor of his generation could slot into; anonymous in a way that doesn’t serve Chalamet especially well. But this year, Chalamet has finally unlocked his full potential. Marty Supreme isn’t just his best work to date—it’s a role that feels like it will forever define his career. Russell Crowe has the gladiator arena, George Clooney has Vegas heists, and now Chalamet has ping pong.
What Marty Supreme understands is that there are two sides to Chalamet. His breakout debut in 2017’s Call Me By Your Name launched his image as a sweet, sensitive artist-type who somehow seems like an old soul and a newborn foal all at once. It’s hard to imagine any viewer watching Chalamet quietly weep into a fireplace and not wanting to reach through the screen to hug him. He earned his first Oscar nomination at just 22 years old—the youngest Best Actor nominee in almost 80 years—and cemented himself as a sort of lanky perpetual youth; an identity he’s never quite lost even as he turns 30 this year.
But equally important is the film that came out the same month as Call Me By Your Name: Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Gerwig smartly realized there’s a flipside to Chalamet’s brooding sensitivity; he works equally well as a detached fuckboy so high on his own supply he can barely hold a conversation that’s not a patronizing philosophy lesson. (As Denis Villeneuve observed of casting him in Dune, “There’s something of a romantic beauty to him. A cross of aristocracy and being a bum at the same time.”) For Chalamet and Gerwig’s next collaboration, Little Women, she helped him craft a take on Theodore Laurence that’s 80% endearing boy next door, 20% entitled asshole.
For Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie flips those percentages. Marty Mauser is in many ways an enraging figure: A 1950s shoe salesman and champion ping pong player who can’t conceptualize a world that doesn’t revolve around him. He’s arrogant, entitled, impulsive, and painfully selfish, the sort of “self-made man” who always seems to risk other people’s stock more than his own. He’s so determined to be great he doesn’t care whose lives he explodes in the process. He’ll turn to the woman he can’t yet admit he loves and sternly proclaim, “I gotta tell you something, Rachel. It’s not intended to be mean: I have a purpose, you don’t.”
And yet, despite all that, there’s something about Marty that’s improbably endearing too. He ends just about every fight with his family by telling them he loves them. He flirts with aging movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) so openly and audaciously that it swings around to being non-threatening. And he’s so unembarrassed by his own ambition that it somehow translates to a sweaty kind of charisma—like when he shocks some journalists by bragging of his Holocaust survivor table tennis opponent, “I’m gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t,” only to somehow swing the interview back to his side by adding, “It’s alright, I’m Jewish, I can say that. In fact, if you think about it, I’m like Hitler’s worst nightmare. Look at me, I’m here, I did it. I’m on top. I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat.”
It’s a tightrope few actors could walk. Chalamet has the same soulful vulnerability as fellow “white boys of the month” like Tom Holland and Paul Mescal. But there’s also a smarmy, character actor side of him that calls to mind the likes of Sam Rockwell or even Steve Buscemi. (Safdie wanted pockmarks on Marty’s skin and had Chalamet wear both contacts and glasses to make his eyes beadier.) For all the talk of Chalamet as the next great movie star, he’s underdiscussed as a comedic actor. But he really is funny, from his turn as a self-important student revolutionary in The French Dispatch to his heartbreaking yet also kind of hilarious proposal scene in Little Women to his impressively straightfaced work in a “brand marketing meeting” that A24 “leaked” as part of the Marty rollout.
More than anything, it’s that comedy instinct that makes Marty Supreme work. It’s the X-factor that blends the sweet and haughty sides of Chalamet’s onscreen persona together, letting us know the actor is in on the joke even when the character isn’t. If Chalamet played the role a little more intensely, the film would veer into the thriller realm of Uncut Gems and if he played it a little lighter, it would lean towards the fairy tale vibe of Catch Me If You Can. Instead, his tragicomic earnestness charts a third path. For all the braggadocious press tour stunts, Chalamet knows Marty Supreme is “a movie about being an idiot and making bad decisions.” It’s just that he can also appreciate that it’s simultaneously a movie about “honoring your ambition and recognizing your talent in the mirror and being singularly focused.”
In other words, it’s a movie about being 23 years old—fittingly, just around the age that Chalamet was when he first got famous. The early inklings of Marty Supreme were born way back then too, when Chalamet charmed Safdie at a party and they dreamt up the idea of working together. (Remarkably, he’s been honing his ping pong skills for the project since 2018!) And even Chalamet admits, “In spirit, this is the most who I was that I’ve had to play a role. This is who I was before I had a career.” Indeed, when Luca Guadagnino first met with him about Call Me By Your Name, one of the things he observed about the young unknown is that “he had the most intoxicating ambition to be a great actor.”
That manic early 20-something desire for greatness fuels Marty like an addict. He’s too old to feel young but too young to understand that the arc of life is long. He’s a weirdly gracious winner, like when he lets the aforementioned Kletzki show off some impressive trick shots rather than just immediately ending a landslide match. But he’s an absolute terror when he loses, probably because he thinks he’s a shark who will die if he stops swimming. “It’s every man for himself where I come from,” Marty explains late into the film. “And sometimes I feel like I don’t even have control over it.”
It’s that feeling of spinning out that Chalamet captures so well. His twitchy physicality and rat-a-tat line delivery conveys a guy whose mouth runs so far ahead of his brain that he barely even knows what he’s said until he says it. There are times when he simply stares agape at a zinger he can’t believe he just delivered—like insulting the dead son of the rich businessman he’s trying to impress. And yet that mile-a-minute energy is the source of his power; literally, in the case of his ping pong prowess but also in his showman salesmanship. Marty pushes and prods and sweet talks until he gets what he wants. The problem is he can’t see that wanting to be the greatest ping pong player in the world isn’t the be-all, end-all of human existence.
What separates Marty Supreme from Safdie’s previous work with his brother Benny is that it finds a note of optimism in all that madness. Where Uncut Gems and Good Time pushed their unstoppable protagonists to the point of implosion, Marty Supreme has hope that maybe Marty can learn to get his priorities in order; that what we’ve just watched unfold over the past two-and-a-half hours is some last gasp of insanity before a baby step towards maturity. Chalamet adjusts the dials of his performance in the film’s final act, reigning in the mania and emphasizing new notes of emotional vulnerability, desperation, and even something resembling genuine humility.
For most of the film’s runtime, Chalamet plays Marty as a man so obsessed with the intricacies of his current scheme, he loses sight of the wider world around him. But by the film’s denouement he finally seems to start seeing a bigger picture. Fittingly for a project dreamed up in the wake of Call Me By Your Name, Marty Supreme also ends with an extended shot of Chalamet crying—not the tears of a heartbroken teen but the tears of a guy (maybe, possibly) stepping into actual adulthood. It’s an effective capper for the first act of a career; still, when we look back on Chalamet’s filmography, Marty may always reign supreme.
