Timothée Chalamet’s film Marty Supreme electrifies in surprise screening

The atmosphere Monday night before the New York Film Festival’s annual surprise screening felt like a movie-world version of Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall was where everyone who gets deeply nerdy about cinema wanted to be: film critics; guys who can be counted on to declare something a “masterpiece” on X seconds after they’ve seen it; and a smattering of hip, famous people such as Myha’la of HBO’s Industry, Christopher Abbott of Poor Things, Eddington director Ari Aster and SNL’s Sarah Sherman.

They were about to see the world premiere of A24’s hotly anticipated Marty Supreme, a gonzo caper set in 1950s New York from director Josh Safdie (Uncut Gems) and starring Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a cocky American table tennis hustler striving for greatness in a disrespected sport on a global stage.

For months, this movie, which releases Christmas Day, had been a black box on the film calendar.

Every Oscars pundit had thrown it into their rankings - and declared Chalamet a best-actor front-runner - despite no one having seen it.

Safdie, who’s broken up his creative partnership with his younger brother Benny (whose first solo movie, The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, debuted to decent reviews and tepid box office numbers Friday), seemed like he might skip the fall festival circuit all together.

Then, suddenly, this. A chance for all that pixelated excitement to come into focus, to turn speculation into reality.

It practically blew the roof off.

Reviews are embargoed, but this equivalent of a hometown game got a thundering standing ovation and a flurry of breathless posts on X declaring it the sports version of Catch Me If You Can or the next Catcher in the Rye.

They’re not wrong: The movie is a scrappy, breakneck stress-machine as Marty, with his giant ego, goes on the run from his exasperated mother (Fran Drescher) and a gun-toting Abel Ferrara as he recklessly seeks to make it to a world championship tournament in Japan to redeem his reputation.

He does this while carrying on steamy affairs with former movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) and his married childhood best friend Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion, Pamela Adlon’s daughter) - and going up against Kay’s pen magnate husband, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary in inspired casting as the movie’s main jerk.

Senior Hollywood Reporter writer David Canfield said it was Chalamet’s “career-best performance.” Indiewire editor at large Anne Thompson said Chalamet was sure to get an Oscar nomination for a performance that “could be his ‘Wolf of Wall Street.’” Hoai-Tran Bui, senior entertainment editor of Inverse, wrote “Timothée’s star power is so bright & undeniable that it’s basically a supernova.”

Before the screening, though, Josh Safdie couldn’t hide his nerves while debuting what is reportedly A24’s most expensive project ever, with a $70 million budget.

“They should rename the word ‘surprise.’ They should call it ‘intense moments of anxiety,’ where the only payoff is it’s just not bad,” he said, walking onstage with a bushy beard and baseball cap to cheers of “Let’s go!”

NYFF director Dennis Lim said he had seen the movie in a very unfinished state months ago and thanked Safdie for “racing to the finish line” to make the screening happen.

“I finished it at 2am yesterday,” Safdie said.

He had used the sound check to make sure the digital projection actually worked. Seven years of work had boiled down to a single date he had earmarked on his calendar: “I was like, ‘Man, I really, really want to make this date because I need to show the film to the city that I love, that means so much to me.”

Then he brought out “a young man chasing greatness” - a reference to Chalamet’s Screen Actors Guild acceptance speech last year. (Winning for his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Chalamet had told the audience: “The truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like this, but I want to be one of the greats.”)

Chalamet, dressed pretty much in head-to-toe black leather, a ball cap hiding a head that fans speculated had been shaved for Dune 3, echoed Safdie’s love for the city. “I went to high school down the street. This is f...ing awesome, dude.”

The pair first met at a party in 2017, where Safdie mistakenly thought Chalamet was tripping on acid. The director mentioned he had seen him on this very NYFF stage that year during a Q&A for Call Me by Your Name. (During that talk, Chalamet fell backward off his chair, jumped up and thrust his arms in the air as if he had just dismounted a gymnastics vault.)

From the second Chalamet appears on-screen in round wire glasses and a pencil-thin mustache, the audience was locked in.

The theater erupted in laughter when a make-out session smash cut to an opening credit sequence in which names are superimposed on a river of sperm racing toward an unfertilized egg that turns into a ping-pong ball with the movie’s name on it, as a bombastic choral version of Alphaville’s Forever Young plays.

Safdie and long-time collaborator Ronald Bronstein asked Chalamet to play the part before there were even any words on the page, Safdie said in his introduction: “It was written for him and his essence and his soul.”

The story is inspired by Safdie’s own obsession with table tennis as a kid, and the tales he would hear from his uncle about the outcasts who had gravitated to the ridiculed sport in smoky, windowless clubs in New York after World War II.

He learned about a Jewish table tennis wizard, Marty Reisman, from a book he and his wife, Sara Rossein, an executive producer and researcher on the film, found in a dollar bin at a thrift store. (Reisman looked just like Chalamet on the book cover.)

Afterward, Safdie started crafting the idea of a scrappy American kid - Mauser is 23 in the film - who sees table tennis filling up stadiums in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and hitches onto it as his ticket to fame and glory.

After the screening, Safdie brought the actors to the stage, including Paltrow, who had come out of semi-retirement to do her first movie in five years.

She’s already being talked about for a supporting-actress-Oscar nomination for a part Safdie said she played “with an electric sadness.”

Tyler the Creator, who plays Wally - a taxi driver, table tennis whiz and Marty’s partner in crime - said he had signed on for his first acting role without reading the script because he trusted Safdie that much.

But the movie really belongs to Chalamet, who is clearly playing ping-pong in most of his scenes, which were choreographed by Diego Schaaf, who made actors look like table tennis pros in Forrest Gump and 2007’s Balls of Fury. Chalamet learned the sport at the same time he was studying guitar to play Dylan.

He started taking lessons at a 24-hour club in Lower Manhattan in 2018, according to the Hollywood Reporter, and during COVID, emptied his Tribeca living room of furniture to make way for a ping-pong table.

He trained in London on the set of Wonka; in Budapest, Jordan and Abu Dhabi while filming Dune 2; and when he was at the Cannes Film Festival to premiere Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch in 2021.

“If anyone thinks this is cap, as the kids say - if anyone thinks this is made-up - this is all documented, and it’ll be put out. These were the two spoiled projects where I got years to work on them,” he told the Hollywood Reporter, referring to Marty Supreme and the Dylan movie.

“This is the truth. I was working on both these things concurrently.”

Last year, Chalamet seemed on his way to win a best-actor Oscar. Already, chatter outside the theatre was that he had left that performance in the dust and will be a formidable competitor to current front-runner Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another.

Certainly, he seems poised to inspire some Gen Zers to get into table tennis.

He had poured himself into the role, giving Safdie sometimes 30 takes of a scene, the director said after the screening. It at least seems poised to be Chalamet’s sexiest, most manic on-screen performance, a hot topic at an after-party at Waverly Inn, where he sat on a banquette with girlfriend, Kylie Jenner.

There, a group of partygoers were reliving a moment during the screening when the camera zooms in on Chalamet’s butt and someone in the audience started clapping, causing the whole theatre to burst into laughter.

Who started the clapping?

“A hero,” one man replied.

“Someone who speaks for us all.”

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