Review: Marty Supreme
- Jennifer William
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
Let's be honest, Marty Mauser’s setbacks are largely his own doing.
He carries himself with the confidence of someone convinced of his own superiority, repeatedly putting himself in situations that could be avoided. Yet his arrogance isn’t born from privilege; it’s born of refusal.
Marty cannot accept the life laid before him: a lower-middle-class existence, a retired dream and a future selling shoes simply because survival demands it. He refuses to settle for anything less than greatness. And that raises an uncomfortable question the film never answers: Can he really be blamed for his ambition?
Who hasn’t dreamed bigger? Who wouldn’t risk failure for a shot at something more, even if it means returning to the same cramped apartment or pay-check-to-pay-check routine?
From the very first scene, Marty Supreme throws us into his world without context, watching ambition unfold without orientation. Only at the film’s final moments does the story come full circle, revealing that initial confusion as intentional.
Marty never pauses to reflect and neither does the audience. His life is motion without stillness.
Visually, the colour orange carries weight beyond marketing. Marty idolizes tennis whites, symbols of class and status he can’t fully access. Orange becomes his compromise, a way to stand out without ever truly belonging. Any chance Marty gets to raise himself, even a fraction, he seizes.
The branding is inseparable from the character; it is Marty’s mindset made visual.
Marty Supreme positions Marty’s true adversaries as not his competitors, but his own ego, hunger and desperation.
Koto Endo, played by Koto Kawaguchi, complicates this, acting as both nemesis and mirror. Where Marty embodies schemes and postures, Koto embodies discipline and earned mastery.
Their rivalry sharpens the film’s central tension: desire versus earned skill.
Marty Supreme moves like a table tennis match, rapid volleys leaving barely a moment to breathe, a momentum that feels unstoppable until suddenly it isn’t.
Josh Safdie’s direction thrives in this disorder, refusing the audience the comfort of reflection until it’s almost too late.
A rare pause occurs when Marty is allowed to hold his baby. Not redemption, but recognition. This is the first time something in his life exists for itself rather than as a tool, a scheme, or a marker of ambition.
That moment lingers into the final act, especially in Marty’s understated return from Japan on a military plane with veterans. He comes from the frontlines of his personal war, stripped of spectacle, abandoning his craving for luxury and special treatment, greeted instead by a quieter, stranger victory at home.
Much of the conversation around the film, however, has focused less on Marty and more on Timothée Chalamet.
Chalamet’s confidence has been described as “athletic,” as he approaches performance the way a competitor approaches sport, a reading reinforced by his 2025 SAG Awards speech in which he declared he was “in pursuit of greatness.”
Whether that confidence is arrogance or honesty is up to the viewer. Marty Supreme doesn’t resolve this; it amplifies it.
The film also touches on the “obsessed artist” trope, a conversation recently reignited by Kristen Stewart’s comments on "method acting."
Her argument, often sensationalized, isn’t about preparation itself but about how intensity is framed. Certain extremes are celebrated when men do them, while women attempting the same are quietly discouraged.
Marty Supreme doesn’t endorse obsession; it presents it as fuel, potent, corrosive and rarely questioned.
The film is not a story of redemption. It neither punishes nor excuses Marty. It follows him, breathless and chaotic, as he reaches for more.
His victories are hollow, his losses self-inflicted, his growth minimal. What the film offers is recognition of the hunger that drives people forward and the damage it leaves in its wake.
The film refuses to frame ambition as either noble or shameful. It just is.