A wild, intoxicating blaze of American ambition and delusion — crowned by Timothée Chalamet in the most electrifying performance of his career.

Every few years, there is a performance that doesn’t simply impress — it detonates. It changes the trajectory of an actor’s career and the way audiences perceive the elasticity of their talent. Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme is one of those performances. What he delivers here is feral and ecstatic, volatile and deeply human, a work of possession rather than portrayal. It is as if Chalamet cracked himself open to let something ancient, hungry, and half-mythic take over.

Josh Safdie, long a master of building cinematic pressure cookers, expands his filmmaking language into something grander, stranger, and more emotionally combustible than anything he’s done before. And Marty Supreme is not Uncut Gems in a gymnasium, nor Good Time refitted with a sports subplot. It is a full-scale opera of American self-invention and self-destruction — a fever dream about the myth of greatness and the cost of insisting the world recognize it. Chalamet’s Marty Mauser isn’t a character; he’s a volatile idea made flesh.

Set in the late 1950s, Safdie refuses the sepia comfort of mid-century nostalgia. His America is still under construction — vibrating, sweaty, neon-lit, humming with postwar hunger and immigrant ambition. This is not a land of dreams but a land of delusions that masquerade as dreams, where mythmaking is as essential as food or air. Safdie captures that spiritual restlessness with a ferocity that feels both historical and startlingly modern. The sidewalks pulse. The smoke in the air moves like memory. Every lamp flicker seems alive with possibility and danger.

(L-R) Tyler Okonma, Timothée Chalamet - **Courtesy of A24**

And Chalamet breathes this atmosphere like oxygen. He plays ping pong as if each volley might save his soul or doom it. There’s an immediacy in his physicality — a tension that borders on religious ecstasy — that reframes the sport not as pastime but ritual. Watching him, you genuinely feel that Marty is outrunning oblivion one swing at a time.

From the first frame, Marty radiates a charisma so volatile it feels like a threat. He enters scenes as though pulled forward by some force within him, unable to contain the velocity of his desire. Safdie, crucially, refuses to tame this energy. The film adopts Marty’s rhythm — explosive, jumpy, unpredictable. Scenes crash into one another like emotional aftershocks. The editing is frenetic but musical, as if Safdie is trying to match the pace of a mind that never stops switching gears.

And this is where Chalamet accomplishes something extraordinary: he plays both the mania and the self-awareness, simultaneously and without contradiction. He lets you see the terror behind the swagger, the loneliness behind the showmanship, the child behind the myth. Marty is performing greatness because he’s terrified he may never achieve it; he’s performing immortality because he’s terrified he will be forgotten. It’s an extraordinarily difficult psychological balance — to play a character who is performing for the world and for himself — and Chalamet executes it with a precision that feels dangerous. It’s the kind of performance that makes you sit up straighter in your seat because you can feel the risk.

Safdie meets him on that edge. The visual language is sweaty, maximalist, and overwhelming — cramped clubs, smoke-thick bars, underground halls glowing like makeshift battlefields. Safdie shoots table tennis like trench warfare. Every smack of the paddle lands like punctuation. Every rally feels like a confession. It is astonishing how he elevates the sport into metaphor: the endless back-and-forth of ego, fear, ambition, insecurity, myth.

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What’s even more impressive is how Safdie captures emotional movement. Marty is shape-shifting constantly — prodigy, menace, clown, folk hero, tragic figure. His personas bleed into one another, never stable, never settled. Safdie’s camera shadowboxes with him, keeping pace but never pinning him down. That restlessness becomes the movie’s emotional backbone.

And it’s why the quiet moments hit so violently. When Marty stops — even for a breath — the silence is suffocating. Chalamet’s eyes flicker with a dozen contradictions: arrogance and shame, triumph and self-loathing, hope and absolute dread. Those pauses reveal the soul he’s losing, piece by piece. It’s devastating.

Chalamet’s physicality is some of the best work any actor has done this decade. The looseness, the sudden jaggedness, the animal panic that occasionally flashes across his face — it all feels instinctive yet meticulously controlled. His voice becomes a barometer of his unraveling: cracking, soaring, collapsing, rebounding. He is constantly teetering at the edge of implosion but never tips into caricature.

There is one sequence — destined to become career-defining — where Marty performs in front of a crowd armed with nothing but bravado, desperation, and a delusional belief that he can reshape the world using sheer willpower. It is heartbreaking and deranged, exhilarating and pathetic. It is also the moment the film reveals itself as a treatise on fame, performance, and the American disease of wanting to be a legend more than wanting to be a person. The camera lingers on him afterward — the applause fading, the persona cracking — and in that stillness, you feel the entire weight of Safdie’s ambition.

Gwyneth Paltrow is razor-sharp and quietly devastating here, grounding Marty with a clarity he can’t summon for himself. Odessa A’zion delivers a breakout performance — raw, intimate, confrontational — capturing the emotional wavelength of someone who refuses to let Marty’s delusions go unchallenged. Their scenes together are volcanic, two frequencies colliding. Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, and Fran Drescher add texture and unpredictability, building a world that is as chaotic and alive as Marty’s inner life.

Safdie, directing solo for the first time at this scale, unleashes a filmmaking sensibility that feels newly liberated. His humor is sharper, his sadness deeper, his compositions richer. His use of color borders on expressionistic — reds that vibrate with mania, golds that pulse with ambition, blues that ache with grief. His editing feels like jazz in motion. He trusts the audience, and the film is better for it. Nothing is overexplained; everything is emotionally legible.

The finale is a masterstroke — a swirling, operatic fusion of fantasy, memory, spectacle, and heartbreak. It pushes the film into mythic territory without losing its human center. Safdie builds tension until it’s almost unbearable, then lets the final moments land with a quiet, devastating clarity. Chalamet delivers one last look — hollow, luminous, terrified, transcendent — and it is, without exaggeration, the most affecting moment of his career.

Marty Supreme is a monumental achievement. Not a curiosity, not a cult item, not a “Safdie experiment.” A full-bodied, full-throttle, artistically unrestrained triumph. It feels alive. It feels dangerous. It feels like cinema operating at its highest level.

And Chalamet — this is the role that will follow him for the rest of his career. The role young actors study. The role directors reference. The role historians point to when tracing the evolution of modern screen performance.

It’s not just the best work he’s ever done. It’s the kind of performance that rearranges an actor’s legacy.

Rating: ★★★★★

That's A Wrap

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Marty Supreme

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That's A Wrap | Marty Supreme |

“Josh Safdie delivers one of the year’s best films, and Chalamet doesn’t just give the performance of his career — he embodies Marty with a dangerous, ecstatic brilliance that makes the film feel alive in your bloodstream. It’s a performance so lived-in it blurs the line between acting and possession — the kind of transformation that would make Stanislavski proud. The film is chaotic, hallucinatory, and unbearably human — a masterpiece of self-invention and self-destruction, and one of the year’s great achievements.”

— Jonathan P. Moustakas

Credits
Release Date: December 25, 2025 | A24
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher
Director: Josh Safdie
Writers: Josh Safdie & Ronald Bronstein
Run time: 2 hours 29 mins
Rating: R