Marty Supreme: Chalamet, Safdie, and Ping-Pong

This is a Josh Safdie film starring Timothée Chalamet as Marty Reisman — a real person. Reisman was a New York City ping-pong hustler and professional player who made a career out of beating people who thought they could beat him. That's the character Chalamet is playing.

The cast around him is genuinely strange in the best way: Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion, Kevin O'Leary, Tyler the Creator, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher. That's not a cast you assemble for a quiet sports biopic. That's a cast you assemble when the movie has something weird and alive going on.

It drops in theaters December 25. A24 is behind it.

If you've seen Uncut Gems or Good Time, you already know what Safdie does. He takes obsessive, chaotic men — usually trapped in their own compulsions — and puts the camera so close to them you feel physically uncomfortable. The editing makes your chest tight. You don't watch his films, you survive them.

Now he's pointing that at ping-pong. Which sounds absurd until you think about it for two seconds. A hustler who lives or dies by a paddle. A subculture built on ego and speed. Underground rooms in New York City where money and pride change hands at a table. That's a Safdie movie waiting to happen.

His whole filmography is about men who can't stop. Marty Reisman reportedly couldn't stop either. That's why this makes sense.

Chalamet is the most interesting casting choice working right now. He keeps picking roles that could easily be misread as prestige bait — Wonka, Bob Dylan, Paul Atreides — and then he actually disappears into them. Whether he does that here is the question.

Marty Reisman wasn't glamorous. He was a grinder. A ping-pong professional in an era when that wasn't a real career path, hustling money games and winning world-class tournaments and living inside a very specific New York obsession. Chalamet playing that means getting physically credible with a paddle, which you can see they've taken seriously from the teaser.

His filmography on Letterboxd reads like someone systematically picking directors who will push him somewhere new. Safdie is the sharpest push yet.

Table tennis has a real professional circuit. The ITTF runs it. The table tennis market globally is bigger than most people assume — equipment brands like Stiga, Joola, and Butterfly are serious businesses with serious athletes behind them.

But the version Marty Reisman lived in was the underground version. NYC's ping-pong underground — basement clubs, money games, players who'd been hitting the same ball for forty years. That world is almost invisible to casual sports fans, which is exactly why it's a good subject for film.

Safdie loves that kind of specific, unglamorous subculture. It's where his best work happens. Not the sport from the outside — the people inside it who can't imagine living any other way.

The teaser is 126 seconds and it tells you almost nothing about plot. That's deliberate. What it does tell you: the visual language is tight and textured, the wardrobe work by Miyako Bellizzi is pulling a specific era of New York, and the energy is anxious in the way all Safdie films are anxious.

The cast cards at the end — Tyler the Creator, Kevin O'Leary, Fran Drescher — feel like they're signaling that this film has a sense of humor about itself. Safdie has always been serious about the human stuff and loose about everything else. That combination is what makes his films watchable even when they're stressful.

The real Marty Reisman is documented. Watch that and then watch the teaser. You'll understand immediately what Chalamet is going for.

If you follow independent cinema at all, yes. Safdie making a feature after Uncut Gems — without his brother Benny, which is itself a story — is one of the more anticipated releases of the year. The subject is stranger than anything he's touched before. The lead is the most-watched actor of his generation.

Sports films live or die on whether you feel the stakes. The best ones — and there aren't many — make you care about a game you don't play. If anyone can make you feel the weight of a ping-pong match, it's probably the director who made a jewelry store feel like a hostage situation.

December 25. A24. Check the full list of 2025-2026 releases if you want context on where this sits in the calendar. It sits at the top.