Timothée Chalamet Wields a Wicked Paddle in New Trailer for A24’s Marty Supreme
From the opening strains of a slowed down, epic-ified version of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” you’d be forgiven for having a difficult time focusing on the screen in this new trailer for Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme because your eyes have reflexively rolled fully back into your head. The trope of the dramatized piece of familiar pop music, used in a prestige biopic trailer of this kind, has become such an overbearing cliche in the last decade and change that it’s a little disappointing to still see it being employed so often. That said, it’s not actually a tangible knock against Safdie’s A24 would-be holiday awards magnet, but you can’t help but shake your head a little.
Marty Supreme stars Timothée Chalamet, fully in Oscar-hunting mode, as Marty Mauser, a hotshot young table tennis/ping pong player in 1950s New York, who dreams of breaking through to international stardom in a sport that didn’t exactly have a lot of exposure at the time. The character is based on the real-life Marty Reisman, a multiple time U.S. ping pong champion known as “The Needle” for his quick wit and slender build, which makes it easier to see why one would think of noted willowy leading man Chalamet as the ideal muse here. Backing him up are Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher and both Gwyneth Paltrow and Odessa A’zion in what look like romantic partner roles of vastly different age brackets.
Marty Supreme is effectively Josh Safdie’s re-debut as a solo directorial artist, his first since 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed. He had of course collaborated alongside brother Benny as writer-directors in recent years on lauded entries like Good Time and Uncut Gems, before the brothers went their separate ways. Benny Safdie returned to the director’s chair this year with the Dwayne Johnson-starring The Smashing Machine, which was warmly received by critics but proved a rather disastrous box office bomb despite its own awards season aspirations. One wonders at the odd similarity of both Safdie brothers having releases in this window that are biopics focusing on largely unknown athletes in relatively unheralded sports, and if Marty Supreme could suffer the same fate as The Smashing Machine. That said, we doubt it: Marty Supreme is clearly being pitched as more of a traditional “determined rise to the top,” feel-good holiday season sports film, and the ping pong focus gives it an interesting novelty, in addition to its bankable star in Chalamet. It’s not like the film is competing against a ton of past ping pong classics–one would hope it should not be difficult for Marty Supreme to clear the bar that is 2007’s Balls of Fury.
Marty Supreme spikes itself down into theaters on Christmas Day, 2025. In the meantime, check out the hot ping pong action and generous helping of cliches in the trailer below.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.