American Hustler: Timothée Chalamet as “Marty Supreme”

Back in my Roger Corman days, I was friendly with a co-worker, Rodman Flender, who had serious directorial ambitions. He came from a family bursting with artistic talent, and once happened to mention that his sister’s son was a budding actor. Of course I smiled benignly: in SoCal pretty much EVERYONE has a relative with acting aspirations . . . and most of them flame out rather quickly. But Rodman’s young nephew turned out to be the exception to the rule, one of those rare creatives whose screen appearances take on a life of their own. You’ve surely heard of Timothée Chalamet, a young man whose talent, combined with his vibrant off-screen personality, makes him a true Hollywood star.

 Chalamet’s breakout performance was in a 2017 Luca Guadagnino film, Call Me By Your Name, in which he played a teenager gobsmacked by his sexual desire for a slightly older young man. I went to see it out of curiosity, but have since concluded that Guadagnino’s work (which also includes the tennis flick, Challengers) is not for me. I find it overly swoony, with everything basically revolving around a hunger for sex. Sill, Call Me By Your Name, which gained international attention, led to Chalamet’s first Oscar nomination, and he was on his way.

 Never one to be typecast, Chalamet went on to play such diverse roles as a callous young stud in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a charming boy next door in Gerwig’s Little Women, and an outer-space messiah-type in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. Perhaps his biggest leap was into convincingly playing (and singing) the part of the young Bob Dylan in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, a role that gave him his second Oscar nom. Now he’s back in another starring role that has required him to master a brand-new skill-set. The word is that he practiced ping-pong for seven years to take on the role of Marty Mauser (based on the real-life Marty Reisman), a bad boy of table tennis in the early 1950s.

 Marty Supreme, directed and co-written by Josh Safdie, continues the Safdie brothers’ passion for hyperkinetic filmmaking. There’s no way you can follow all the twists and turns of the plot, but it brilliantly conveys a New York state of mind: everyone is a little angry, and in a great hurry to get somewhere. For Marty, championship-level table tennis is a way to escape his salesman job at his uncle’s shoe store and move into the wider world. But there are complications: his family disapproves, he’s short on money for travel, and his casual but sometimes intense passion for the cute young thing downstairs will have its own unforeseen consequences (as is hinted by a rather remarkable credit sequence at the top of the film).

 Critics have talked about Marty Supreme as an exposé of the always-hustling American personality type, and I’m sure they’re right. There’s one element, though, that I haven’t seen mentioned. The film is very specifically set just after World War II, and—in one way or another—all these characters seem shell-shocked, whether or not they came anywhere near a battlefield. Marty’s #1 ping-pong opponent, a Japanese young man with an emotionless face and manner, is said to have been deafened in childhood by the bombing of Tokyo. The immigrant teammate Marty strives to outrank has numbers tattooed on his arm, courtesy of the Nazis. The always cocky Marty announces himself—an American Jew—as Hitler’s worst nightmare. The role fits Chalamet so well, I believe, because he too is hustling for fame and fortune.