“What do you plan to do if this whole dream of yours doesn’t work out?” someone asks Timothée Chalamet’s character, Marty Mauser, in the trailer for Josh Safdie’s new film Marty Supreme.
“That doesn’t even enter my consciousness,” he replies.
He may be deluded, because is dream is to be a ping pong star. Can you name any ping pong stars? If not, you understand the central problem of Marty’s character, nicely summed up by the Marty Supreme trailer.
But the trailer somehow makes you believe in Marty’s big dream, unlikely as it may seem, thanks in part to the inclusion of the 1984 hit “Forever Young” by Alphaville. The song is a little out of place for a story set in the 1950s, but it very much works.
“This game, it fills stadiums overseas,” Mauser says in the Marty Supreme trailer. “And it’s only a matter of time before I’m staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box.”
The theme’s tagline is simple: Dream Big.
The studio-provided logline: “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.”
Josh Sadie Returns as a Solo Director With Marty Supreme
The film, which also stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, and Fran Drescher, is Josh Safdie’s latest film since 2019’s acclaimed Uncut Gems, which he co-directed with his brother, Benny Safdie.
Benny Safdie disclosed last year that the brothers are no longer directing together, which he called a natural progression. Josh Safdie has not commented.
Benny Safdie’s solo directorial debut, The Smashing Machine, is also sports story: It stars Dwayne Johnson as UFC fighter Mark Kerr, and comes out in October, two months before Marty Supreme, which arrives December 25. Both films are from A24.
Though Marty Supreme is Josh Safdie’s first recent film without his brother, it is not his solo directorial debut: That was Josh 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, which Josh Safdie co-wrote with Eleonore Hendricks, and directed himself. It established his reputation for gritty, urban storytelling.
He and Benny Safdie then co-directed 2009’s Daddy Longlegs, the 2013 documentary Lenny Cooke,
2014’s Heaven Knows What, and 2017’s Good Time, before gaining widespread attention for A24, which starred Adam Sandler as a desperate jewelry dealer, deep in gambling debt.
Marty Supreme is co-written by longtime Safdie collaborator Ronald Bronstein.
Relatively little has been revealed about the film, making the Marty Supreme trailer of particular interest to Safdie and Chalamet fans.
One detail that emerged early was that Paltrow’s character, a movie star, has an intimate relationship with Marty.
The 52-year-old actress quipped to Vanity Fair about her scenes with Chalamet, 29: “I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’”
Marty apparently has more than one romantic interest in the film: The Marty Supreme trailer also shows him passionately kissing A’zion’s character.
Marty Supreme arrives in theaters December 25 from A24.
Main image: Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. A24.