Marty Supreme (2025)

Watched 1/4/25 (theater)

It’s funny—I love the Dune movies, they’re two of my favorites of the 2020s, I believe because they fit into that category of immense responsibility put onto one person. It’s one of those fascinating dilemma’s that almost always gets my attention and enjoyment, especially with Dune, it being on such a large scale. In that story, the main character of Paul Atreides is played by Timothée Chalamet. And as much as I think I’d be rubbed the wrong way by the guy if I ever had a beer with him, he continues to make some of my favorite movies. In Marty Supreme, he is tasked with immense irresponsibility, which for whatever reason I almost always find equally alluring to the more positive flipside. Irresponsibility in a movie can be frustrating, yes, but as long as the character is clearly smarter than his actions and is genuinely choosing to act in such manners, it can be one of the most thrilling, magnetic, and fulfilling themes for a movie to go after. This really worked for me in Marty Supreme.

To get it out of the way, I loved Uncut Gems and Good Time, 2019 and 2017 movies, respectively, that were also predicated on unreasonable, almost unfathomable decision-making. Those movies featured Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler perpetually flushing their livelihoods down the toilet with the most juvenile of choices. To the point where you gasp, despite knowing it’s coming after a while. So idiotic, so chaotic, so oddly compelling. It’s no surprise, then, that when you do something similar with a 23-year-old who vacillates between athlete, businessman, and hustler, it wreaks pitch/perfect havoc for someone who enjoyed those last two pictures.

Chalamet is Marty Mauser, a NYC kid who knocks up his married childhood friend in the opening scene before descending into money-raising, ping-pong-dominated hell for the remainder of the movie. Manic wins, vile losses, and vomit-inducing violence ensue as Marty juggles a horrible relationship or two, a rogue’s gallery of epic extended cameos, and various episodes of the most shocking mix between sports and crime fiction. It ties together all of the interests of a 16-year-old boy in the package of a synth-soundtrack, breakneck-pace, wildly-uncaged 23-year-old fever dream. Marty’s unchained ambition charts a course for stardom—he wants to be king of the world—and he winds up coming inches away from the gutter several times over on his way to an ending that is as satisfying as it is terrifying.

Chalamet’s performance wowed me—completely different from his Paul Atreides. But it’s the dialogue (unshowy, to-the-point, constantly building a sort of chess match) that lets him rip through his scenes with a tenacity that no other movie this year gave to me. In its main character’s battles against actors and non-actors of equally incredible credibility, Marty Supreme never slowed down, never showed seams, and never caught me in disbelief of what I was seeing on the screen.

There is a long tradition of Young-Confident-Dummy-Who-Goes-Too-Far movies, with some of my all-time favs being Risky Business, Go!, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. All of these scripts present a guy who gets to the point where he thinks he can win it all off confidence, and all of the stories build to moments where a force greater than our main character brings their run to a screeching halt, albeit with little consequence on account of them being upbeat movies about teens. Of course Uncut Gems and Good Time also did this, in very memorable fashion. They showed, conversely, what happens if you’re old and you’ve gone too far and you’re no longer given plot armor up the wazoo. Marty Supreme finds this novel approach that recalls the electric highs of those adolescent escalations while marrying it to the higher stakes and tension of the last few Safdie films. Pretty much the best reaction you can get from me in a movie theater is getting me to put my hands on my head with a big smile and muttering, “Holy Shit.” This movie got that a few times.

In the end, it’s a movie about being dumb in your twenties and having a mustache—why wouldn’t I like it? It also features music that is part of the genre “vapor-wave?” Vapor wave?? That’s pretty much the coolest term ever invented. Had never heard of this until Marty Supreme but I was immediately all in on the Daniel Lopatin score. It’s time to revel in the fact that we got the holy trinity of music this year with Marty, 28 Years, and Sinners. What a year for tunes!

And not only does the music add to the energy of the plot, but adds to the scale of the story as well, with the final showdown in Tokyo being bookended by epic tracks that set the stage for something truly big. Other than Avatar, nothing this year felt for me like it had this type of scope. And at “just” $70 million, that’s a feat with the resources given. The Brutalist pulled off a similarly rad magic trick last year… Really got me jazzed for whatever the Safdies do or just this Safdie does next!

10/10