Made in America

Sam Bodrojan unpacks Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” and the mythmaking around a monoculture masterpiece.

By Sam BodrojanDecember 26, 2025

• Film

BRIGHT ORANGE BLIMPS over Los Angeles, branded Nahmias jumpsuits. A belated NYFF premiere via a “secret screening.” Pictures of Zohran Mamdani posing with Fran Drescher. For weeks, only one review out from under embargo, on Charli XCX’s Letterboxd.

The immediate critical impulse is to ignore all of this. Understandably—it would be more enlightened to engage with a movie beyond its marketing, to approach art ignorant of press release promises (to say nothing of, at the time of writing, the biggest per-screen box office average since 2016). This dismissal also presages contrarianism or, better yet, a muted respect, one that belies an understanding of the picture unclouded by fanaticism. Yet it feels naive and self-limiting to overlook that this is, for a certain sect of moviegoing audiences, the cinematic event of 2025. This is a litmus test for whether the recent resurgence of cinephilia among Gen Z and millennial audiences can prove economically viable in the mainstream culture industry. And in an era when the non-blockbuster theatrical experience is increasingly reliant on a young crowd, many of whom associate repertory screenings with their whole aesthetic (if not their sense of self), Josh Safdie’s latest—and his first since 2008 not to be co-directed with his brother Benny—seems to carry a disproportionate amount of hope for American cinema’s future. Accordingly, the press cycle has felt less like marketing than like a rallying call for self-proclaimed “hypebeasts” across the nation. Not only is A24 seeking to replicate the Christmas miracle of Uncut Gems’ breakout success in 2019, but the studio’s also hoping to do so on what would be, for them, an unprecedented scale; with a reported budget of $70 million, Marty Supreme is the most expensive movie the studio has ever produced.

The marketing is not, then, showboating for the sake of it, or else over-the-top to the point of obfuscating the film, but a natural extension of its essence. This is a film destined to be major. Major, yes—but not necessarily cool. Because Marty Supreme is not cool. Its New Wave needle drops and coy political provocations have lost their chic luster. Like so much pop culture, it is a rehash of formal tics that tipped into the oversaturated and passé years ago, stuck awkwardly between unfalsifiable existentialism and unevenly sanded-down edgelord schtick. But make no mistake: Marty Supreme’s uncoolness is key to its dogged, four-quadrant appeal. Here is a film that caters to TikTok edits and boomer appetites alike. Its cast features multiple nepo babies, one of the biggest musicians in the world, a reality TV star, the president of SAG-AFTRA, the sole canonized Gen Z movie star, and almost certainly the highest average net worth of people on-screen this year.

In short: Marty Supreme is the monoculture. It is also an astonishing feat of cinema, a Barnum-effect spectacle where audience and movie star meld together until any sense of self, purpose, past, or future dissolve. It is the culmination of a character, a director, and an actor simultaneously pursuing their own canonization—and, in the process, accepting the obligation to make a movie that ought to be everything to everyone. The result is an unqualified success, a film that leaves the audience at once ecstatic and haunted.

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Marty Supreme has—let’s call it a playful relationship to history. It takes place over eight-and-a-half months between 1952 and 1953, or the length of a pregnancy; specifically, that of Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), a young woman stuck in an abusive marriage. Rachel spends her days working at an exotic pet shop, sneaking off during her lunch break to have sex with her childhood friend. She loves him, wants to make a life together. He’s got other things on his mind. He impregnates her in the stockroom of the shoe store where, conveniently, he also works. The opening credits are a puerile but effective thesis statement, as an egg, swarmed by thousands of sperm cells singing “Forever Young,” slowly spins to reveal that it is, in fact, a ping-pong ball, emblazoned with the film’s name alongside an incidental subtitle: “Made in America.”

The childhood-friend-cum-baby-daddy is Marty Mauser. Marty, played by Timothée Chalamet, is loosely based on Marty Reisman, a hustler and famous table tennis player. In the film, Marty spends all his free time training at Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis with his best friend Wally (Tyler Okonma, a.k.a. Tyler the Creator). He’s saved up enough money from the shoe shop for a flight to London, where he’ll represent the United States at the Table Tennis World Championships. But when he gets there, he’s immediately distracted trying to woo Kay Stone, a fading starlet of the silent era played by Gwyneth Paltrow. After a humiliating defeat by Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), Marty tours the world with the Harlem Globetrotters alongside Holocaust survivor Béla Kletzki.

Back in London, one of Marty’s hubristic romantic gestures had drawn the attention of Kay’s husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), the owner of a pen company, and, on one of his tour stops, Milton meets Marty for lunch to pitch him an opportunity: a sponsored exhibition match with Endo in Japan, a week before the next World Championships. But when Marty returns to New York mere days before the championships, a series of mishaps—armed robbery, an overdue hotel bill, a claw-foot tub on some unstable flooring—compels him to reconsider Milton’s offer.

In many ways, the movie could have been a more straightforward biopic or period piece: like Chalamet’s Marty Mauser, the real-life Marty Reisman also trained at Lawrence’s, the first Black-owned establishment in Times Square; Reisman, too, toured with the Globetrotters. It is more accurate, however, to consider the film’s historical basis as an extension of its obsession with time distortion. Safdie has built his picture around four games of ping-pong; any event in between is liable to dilate or contract. This unpredictable structure is mirrored by the narrative’s shoot-outs, shouting matches, and ravishing love scenes. In other words: Marty Supreme is not a genre film—no, not even a sports movie. It is a movie driven by a maniacal, supernatural drive to entertain. The film courses with extravagant Old Hollywood flourishes almost never granted to non-blockbuster fare nowadays: shots of a dog running through smoke or a sea of table tennis matches (honestly, given their lack of metaphorical or narrative importance, I have no idea how they made it in).

Take, for example, one of the film’s standout sequences. After swiping some cash off a mobster under the guise of bringing the man’s dog Moses to the vet, Wally and Marty drive out to a bowling alley in New Jersey to run a scam on some unsuspecting marks. Wally, the only Black man in the room, weaponizes white guilt to get everyone at the alley to pitch in some cash after he intentionally loses. Marty plays the heel, and together the two swindle them out of 200 bucks—only to get chased down by a mob of gentiles at a gas station, all decorum vanishing as the gang hurls slurs at the two hustlers.

Even described in isolation, the sequence seems to verge on indulgent, a meticulously rendered but perhaps unnecessary set piece; surely there’s no reason to keep this many plates spinning. This isn’t empty spectacle, however. Such ostensible “detours” emphasize the material’s tertiary semiotic preoccupations. The bowling alley is quintessential American iconography, a space whose racial dynamics (among others) are slyly inverted, for profit, by our heroes. The alley is so rich in the broader mythos and imagery of the film that it’s easy to forget that Wally and Marty have only the thinnest reasons for being there in the first place. The cumulative effect of such scenes is borderline-Dickensian, serialesque—like its makers are getting paid by the minute but still can’t risk anybody tapping out. The scope of the film is thus large and luxurious; Marty Supreme has the means, creatively and financially, to integrate any tangent.

The film is so expansively, associatively plotted that it would take a thousand more words to spell out the rest in even the briefest terms. Safdie and Ronald Bronstein (co-writer on every previous Safdie brothers feature) have crafted a screenplay where incident and consequence alike feel fated, one whose characters are scrambling to stay ahead of any avalanche of misfortune. By the halfway mark, there are so many convergent stressors that one would be forgiven for forgetting one of the many debts Marty owes, or miscounting how many people he has chasing after him. Yet the production of such mental overwhelm (be it conscious or subconscious) is not an overambitious misstep but another directorial masterstroke: the script’s overwhelming plotting goads the viewer to remain in the perpetual present; to be swindled by Marty’s scrappy, patchwork problem-solving; to fall under the same spell as those unwise or unlucky enough to be his co-conspirators. Despite the fact that I have seen the film multiple times, it is impossible, when watching, to recall events more than one scene in advance.

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If a movie as epic and multifaceted as Marty is “about” one thing above all else, it is assimilation as a type of performance, the kind that demands both the caricature and the erasure of one’s own identity in exchange for personal gain. This is never better exemplified than by the titular hero. Marty is consistently foregrounding his own Jewishness. He declares himself “Hitler’s worst nightmare” because he knows that’ll get him written up in the paper. Upon learning that Milton and Kay’s son died during World War II, Marty pressures fellow player Béla Kletzki to tell Milton a shockingly erotic story from his time in a concentration camp; Kletzki, it should be mentioned, is played by Géza Röhrig, who starred as a death camp prisoner in the controversial Hungarian Auschwitz thriller Son of Saul (2015).

Marty Supreme is constantly playing chicken like this: employing stunt casting (see above) or minor but provocative details reveals, at times, a kind of shit-eater mentality, a willingness to delight in the protagonist’s abuse of their own privilege. Is this a satire of identity politics, or a tragedy about a man who sublimates himself in the pursuit of American exceptionalism? Previous films from the Safdie brothers were easier to parse, and Marty’s allusions to these suggest that Josh may think of his oeuvre as necessary metatext for his latest. A shot of orange ping-pong balls falling from an apartment building echoes the shot of the body sailing toward the concrete at the end of Good Time (2017); in a direct homage to Uncut Gems, Marty gifts his mother a stolen piece of the Egyptian pyramids, reminding her that Jews built them. But Good Time was unforgiving in its portrayal of a protagonist relentlessly taking advantage of the Black people around him, and Adam Sandler’s Howie, in Uncut Gems, is defined by a self-annihilating penchant for thievery. Marty shares these qualities but shrugs off his predecessors’ outright antihero status. When it comes to Marty’s awareness of his own culpability, the film maintains plausible deniability. Marty may ride the coattails of Black communities and weaponize postwar tensions for personal gain, but the film never outright condemns him, never portrays Marty as intentionally harming those around him (even, somewhat surprisingly, Rachel). The grandiose world Safdie has constructed on-screen is too smitten with Marty’s bewitching show of American exceptionalism, with the thrill of being a child of immigrants in the great melting pot of New York City, chasing a stupid dream.

Whether Safdie’s world convinces is entirely up to its actors. The script relies on performers wholly committed to selling an aspirational fantasy that the film, in turn, calls into question. This is not merely a movie with a host of compelling performances; it is a movie that harbors evident affection for manufactured empathy and celluloid idolatry. It is a movie that believes in affectation itself as a principal virtue.

This is never clearer than when Paltrow is on-screen. Safdie personally convinced the celebrity to take a pause from her (vaguely immoral) $450-million-dollar Goop empire and return to a non-MCU film for the first time in a decade. Paltrow, lately, makes most of her appearances as a charmingly unbothered, willfully naive podcast host; one would be forgiven for forgetting that she is also a great movie star. The camera is in love with her—and who wouldn’t be? A woman with Paltrow’s talent for lending even the harshest spotlight a soft glow is one of a kind. Kay is a former silent film darling hoping to make a resurgence in the theater. For Kay, the affair with Marty represents the future; he hadn’t even been born when she made her last big picture. She is charmed by his compulsive scheming, never more enamored with him than when he offers a phony justification for stealing her prop jewelry. To Marty, Kay is a beautiful relic, someone he wants to both emulate and surpass. Marty Supreme is not a love story, but it is classically romantic: Marty moves through the world compelled by a brazen, sweetheart hedonism that distracts those around him from his selfishness. When he sneaks in to watch Kay’s rehearsal, he woos her by parroting back her frustrations and showering her with praise. It’s game, certainly—but that doesn’t mean it’s not earnest.

The rest of the supporting cast is uniformly fantastic. Odessa A’zion is a great crier, a great smiler, a great shouter. Tyler the Creator has played to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, and that live magnetism is not diminished on-screen. Kevin O’Leary’s turn as Milton is genuine outsider art. He delivers every line as if it had been fed to him 20 seconds prior, with a flatly cruel affect. The result is simply demonic, an entrancing foil—both narratively and stylistically—for Marty.

Chalamet is, of course, the main event. Marty Mauser is a character who requires a bona fide thespian in addition to a fame hound. Chalamet wants the attention, openly; he wants everyone to be endeared to him, wants to inspire those who resent Marty to live vicariously through him anyway. (Not since Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort has a character been more primed for sigma memes.) Like Mauser, Chalamet is a show-off who actively nurtures his own arrogance because it makes his undeniable gifts more obvious. The bit pays off: here, he is simply astounding, bending light around him whenever he appears. Table tennis is about being good with your shoulders, and there is no one better at acting from their shoulders than Chalamet (this precise command of physicality was evident all the way back in 2017’s Call Me by Your Name).

Of course, Marty is an icon with no perfect analogue, a vessel not only for Chalamet but for Safdie and Bronstein to embody as well. One of the primary joys of the film is watching a dozen artists at the top of their game wrestle for control of the screen. Certainly, this is a highly significant showcase for Josh Safdie. The early and (so far) sustained success of his first filmic foray without his brother has led to some glibly labeling Josh as “the good one,” suggesting that it’s hard to feel Benny’s absence. This has arguably less to do with the relative gifts of the brothers and more to do with Marty retaining many of their previous collaborators—namely, DP Darius Khondji and composer Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never). Still, there are clear differences between the two brothers’ styles: Benny is more reserved, preferring wide, challenging shots that engage his performers in battle with their surroundings, while Josh tends to tag behind the characters, camera handheld as if trying to catch some of their body heat on the light sensor. Benny’s vivid, effective work on The Curse (2023–24) proved that he has a gift. But with this year’s The Smashing Machine, Benny neutered his experimental recreation of a documentary by wrangling it into a sappy, throwback biopic. Marty makes equivalent but opposite concessions in the hope of courting prestige and widespread appeal; the style Josh once deployed to signal realism now appears in service of a grand entertainment, with broad humor and classic shoot-outs. On this front, it’s clear who made the better play.

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What about Ronald Bronstein? Marty Mauser’s schemes are as much descended from those of the door-to-door salesman in Frownland (2007) as those in any of either Safdie brother’s previous works. It’s hard not to position parts of Marty as companion pieces to Ronald’s wife Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, also released widely this fall. Certainly, one can imagine Odessa A’zion and Rose Byrne’s characters swapping lives: both unstable mothers seek to reunite with their child’s distant, workaholic father. The two films are likewise fixated on psychoanalysis: the climax of Legs finds Byrne pulling an umbilical cord–like tube out of her daughter in the hopes of either saving or killing her; Marty’s postwar Oedipus complex ultimately gets him spanked with a Japanese paddle designed by his boss, the man he’s actively cucking and a father whose son Marty will inevitably seek to avenge via table tennis.

If any single person’s presence is felt in every frame, it’s that of Jack Fisk, the greatest production designer of all time. The film simply would not work without Fisk’s ability to conjure a setting that is both alive and evocative of now-mythic 1950s Americana. Interstitial shots of the floor or the top of a drawer intimate a dense world beyond the frame. There are multiple visits to a roadside house that recalls the paintings of Andrew Wyeth; even brief glimpses inside reveal a mountain of stuff so brilliantly strewn about that it manages to outline an otherwise extraneous figure’s entire life. Thanks to Fisk, Marty Supreme feels like time travel.

The metaphysical nature of the film does not stop there. With an anachronistic synth-pop score that threatens our midcentury hero with grim portents of the future, Chalamet’s decidedly mid-2010s bravura, the veneration for pre-code high jinks, and the spotlight on a leading lady of the silent era, one suspects that effectively all of Hollywood cinema is converging on these two-and-a-half hours. Marty Supreme posits that 1952 is the United States at the zenith of its influence—the vanishing point of our imperial ambitions and, by extension, our national image-making. This transitory period we propagandize as uncomplicated greatness is, according to the film, exactly when everything went wrong. But Josh Safdie does not succumb to simple nostalgia; Marty is the ultimate American, a man who—in his core, embodied ideals—could only have come from a country rotten from its very conception. Beneath all its seductive spectacle, Marty Supreme thereby harbors a cynical darkness. The film’s winking historiography turns a ping-pong ball into a flying black hole that condenses a century and a nation into a single, hollow, loud moment.

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In the end, Marty makes it to Japan only to discover he won’t be allowed to compete in the real championships. Before the exhibition game can finish, he goes against Milton’s order and challenges Endo to an unstaged match. Ahead of the winning point, Milton approaches Marty courtside. He pulls Marty aside and mutters, “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire,” in a terrifying, literal tone of voice. “Win or lose, if you go back out there, you’ll be stuck there for the rest of your life.” Marty brushes him off, but the words linger after his victory. The boy is doomed. He gets a ride back to the States with the troops, where he is greeted with the premature birth of his child.

The film ends with Marty looking down at his baby in the maternity ward from the hallway, separated by a piece of glass. When the child sees Marty, they immediately stop crying. Marty, though, bursts into loud, aggressive sobs. This finale, set to Tears for Fears’ hit from decades later, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” is both saccharine and ironic. Unlike Safdie’s previous heroes, Marty has gotten everything he could ever want, and the triumphant sensory experience of the picture reaches a fitting crescendo. At the same time, during the dawn of the baby boom, which would go on to sink the US in the following century, we witness Marty actualize the promise of his nation in the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. Having rejected all those who came before him, Marty is shocked to look upon his future and see only emptiness. Greatness is behind him; the future is utterly empty and domestic.

Yet simultaneously, the audience has achieved a kind of distilled catharsis: they have been given the vessel of Marty, and can now abandon it—him—in this purgatory. Marty Supreme is everything to everyone, as much as any one film ever could be. It is a vicious, invigorating summation of American image-making’s past, present, and future. It is cosmic.