“Marty Supreme” is frenetic and obnoxious and stylish and high on itself for possessing those qualities — a filmmaker-as-star movie that’s impossible to discuss without mentioning its bravura because bravura is all that it’s about. Some of you are going to love this movie, and some of you are going to leave feeling numb.
The director is Josh Safdie, going solo after collaborating with his brother Benny on notable underworld dramas like “Heaven Only Knows” and “Uncut Gems.” Benny went solo this year too, directing Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in the underrated UFC biopic “The Smashing Machine,” which seemed to steer Benny in a more mainstream direction. “Marty Supreme” finds Josh doubling down on the hallucinatory speed-freak quality of “Uncut Gems,” without that film’s anguished center.
Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) is an eager shyster living in a crowded nightmare fantasia of the Lower East Side in 1952, which, courtesy of legendary production designer Jack Fisk, is a smorgasbord of atmospheric rot. Marty wants to be the world champion of table tennis and he is willing to do anything to achieve this end. Safdie is hip enough to anticipate your reaction of “table tennis? Who cares?” The gulf existing between the potential gains of Marty’s dream and the costs of what he’s willing to do to get it is the source of the film’s irony, and its reason for being.
“Marty Supreme” is nothing but digressions because the notion of digressing suggests freedom to Safdie. He wants a movie, tethered to an untethered character, in which it feels as if anything can happen. For some reason, I thought of the astonishing Philip Roth novel “Sabbath’s Theatre,” which realized Safdie’s aspirations. Safdie achieves this aim in fits and starts, but anything goes begins to feel like its own predictability.
The movie packs heat for an hour or so. Safdie improbably turns table tennis into a form of kinetic cinematic combat, and we seem to be witnessing a joke on the idea that movies can prompt us to root for anything. Think of the drama that “The Karate Kid” milks from a high school martial arts contest. Safdie spins melodrama out of table tennis without losing sight of the humor, having his cake and eating it. For a little while, the fact that Marty is an asshole carries a charge too. Appearing to weigh about 90 pounds, with a pencil mustache that’s meant to be an alpha statement in its unapologetic dorkiness, Marty gets off on being much sleazier than he appears to be.
Marty is all id. He sleeps with married women; he gets his best friend pregnant and abandons her; he steals money from lovers and family without any hesitation. Like the characters in Martin Scorsese’s gangster movies, Marty (the name doesn’t seem incidental) is all machismo, bluster, bullshit and insatiable hunger. He wants and he will have, and the movie is nothing but endless set pieces of him scamming, taking and escaping, leaving chaos and even carnage in his wake. Marty doesn’t even show any humility when he’s playing table tennis. He’s constantly offending other people, other customs, insisting it’s his way or the highway. Some of this bluster is meant to be satirical of American entitlement, but Safdie and Chalamet are getting off on it too.
The Scorsese characters have majesty; their evil is seductive and has a way of indicting the viewer. “Goodfellas,” an orgy of sensation, can leave you asking yourself why you’re getting off on all this evil. I found Marty merely repellent, a pissant scoundrel—and yes, of course that’s the point, as this is one of those movies that has anticipated everything about it that will annoy you. Safdie spends two-and-a-half hours daring you to be prudish enough to reject his movie. This dare is especially formidable if you, like me, continue to find Chalamet irritating. I admire the performance, particularly how Chalamet pushes his persona consciously to the breaking point of tolerability, but admiring it and watching it are not the same thing.
Safdie, who co-wrote and co-edited the movie with the filmmaker Ronald Bronstein, has something close to Scorsese’s swagger. But he does not possess Scorsese’s interest in human beings. Dudes love the Scorsese crime movies for their intensity, the mixture of rock-n-roll and violence and gallows humor and camera pyrotechnics and moral relativity. But many dudes, and many dude filmmakers in Scorsese’s thrall, seem less interested in what makes the maestro’s crime movies more than macho action: an interest in human nature. “Goodfellas” is about 10 different movies, one of which is an intricate comedy of manners.
“Marty Supreme” is one of those movies in which people are always yelling to keep the energy up and, as in last year’s profoundly overrated “Anora,” the monotony grows existentially grating. Things are always happening in “Marty Supreme” yet nothing seems to be happening. The sense of movement here, coupled with the endless grays of the cinematography, becomes soup. Marty gets involved in a variety of criminal conspiracies that lead to several surprises yet it’s all essentially the same cacophony, leading to a climactic tennis match that, seriously, who cares?
The flash of “Uncut Gems” had a purpose, plunging you into the addled head space of a gambling junkie. “Marty Supreme” is a parade of hipster credentials. Though set in the 1950s, the soundtrack is full of 1980s-era nostalgia bangers, while the cast abounds in one stunt cameo after another, from Fran Dresher to Abel Ferrara to Penn Jillette to David Mamet to, in the film’s most appealing performance, Gwyneth Paltrow. As a faded actress in an inexplicable off-and-on thing with Marty, Paltrow is one of the few people here who is interested in mining the humanity of the material.
Based on a documentary of the same name, “Song Sung Blue” is about Mike (Hugh Jackman) and Claire Sardina (Kate Hudson), who attained some fame in the late 1980s and early ‘90s as Lightning & Thunder, a Neil Diamond tribute act. As this movie has it, they met while doing covers of other artists in the carnival scene. They are both struggling working-class people with an artistic impulse that craves direction. They find said direction in Diamond’s music, marry, blend their families, and achieve a level of self-fulfillment at a time when they suspected that they’d reached their expiration dates.
Writer-director Craig Brewer is a specialist in this kind of movie, getting his start 20 years ago with “Hustle & Flow,” which, though much grittier on the surface, nearly has the same plot as “Song Sung Blue.” This project certainly benefits from Brewer’s shrewdness. He knows how to use dirt to sell the schmaltz. This is a movie that is attentive to how people with little money, busting their asses in thankless jobs, live day to day. It is even more attentive to the disappointment carried by people who’ve never realized their dreams, never transcended their idea of themselves.
There is a wonderful moment, late in the movie, when Mike has experienced setbacks and has managed to talk himself into a job as a M.C. a few nights a week at a Thai restaurant. The owner of the restaurant is in mourning, and we see he and Mike crouched at a table late at night, stewing in their regrets, with Diamond on the speakers. Brewer gives the moment just the right amount of emphasis. He doesn’t force it, doesn’t turn it into a moment For Your Consideration, and it lingers.
This is essentially a jukebox musical in which the moments in between the songs are taken seriously. Brewer is in sync with why people love Diamond’s songs: at their best and even their not-so-best, they turn kitsch into working-class epiphanies. Brewer is aware that many people see Diamond as a joke, a karaoke novelty, and he rhymes that tarnished reputation with Lightning & Thunder’s sense of being overlooked. When they begin to click, and the music pours forth, Brewer allows you to share in their ecstasy.
Hugh Jackman is commanding and poignant, but it’s Kate Hudson who surprised me. I haven’t taken Hudson seriously since “Almost Famous” 25 years ago, but she sheds the baggage of those trivial rom-coms and comes roaring back to life, giving Claire’s need to be seen a sensual and lived-in ferocity.
“Song Sung Blue” is a rarity: a rousing and honorable crowd-pleaser. You may see it with your family and discover that they aren’t the only ones singing its song.
“Marty Supreme” and “Song Sung Blue” are in theaters everywhere.
