Marty Supreme is not a biopic and the man at its centre does not exist. But it started with a real hustler’s memoir, and the real hustler’s life contains a loss so strange that the film could not use it.
Josh Safdie’s first solo feature — he wrote it with Ronald Bronstein, A24 released it, it runs 150 minutes and premiered at the New York Film Festival on 6 October 2025. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a table tennis player in 1950s New York who is certain he is the best alive and cannot get anyone to agree.
Where it came from
In 2018 Safdie’s wife gave him a book: The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, published in 1974 by a man called Marty Reisman. Safdie has been plain about what it did — Reisman “was my entry point into the world.” Not the subject. The door.
What survives into the film is atmosphere and a handful of details Safdie calls homage. The plot is invented. The name is invented. Even the character Rachel Mizler is only loosely shaped by Geri Falk, Reisman’s first wife. Table Tennis England, who have no reason to be diplomatic about it, put it simply: the film catches the hustling spirit and much of the rest is fiction.
That is worth knowing before you watch it, because it tells you what Safdie was after. He did not want a life. He wanted a register.
The man the film is not about
Marty Reisman was born in Manhattan in 1930 and died in New York in 2012, aged 82. They called him The Needle.
He learned in the settlement houses of the Lower East Side and was city junior champion at thirteen. Then he went to Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club on 54th Street and learned the other half of the job: lose the early games, let the stakes double, then stop pretending. He would play sitting down. Blindfolded. With a Coke bottle, a garbage-can lid, a shoe, a light bulb, or his own glasses instead of a bat.
The record is real, not just the act. Five World Championship bronzes between 1948 and 1952. The English Open in 1949 — still the only American man ever to win it. US Men’s Singles in 1958 and again in 1960. And then, at sixty-seven, the US National Hardbat Championship in 1997, which may make him the oldest person ever to win an open national title in a racket sport. From 1949 to 1951 he toured as the Harlem Globetrotters’ halftime act, playing comedy table tennis with frying pans and shoe soles. His party trick was slicing a cigarette in half with a forehand smash. He was still doing it on Letterman in 2008.
The loss at the centre
Here is the part the film gestures at and cannot tell.
At the 1952 World Championships in Bombay, Reisman met a Japanese player named Hiroji Satoh in the second round. Satoh was using a bat covered in thick foam sponge rather than the pimpled rubber everyone else played with. It was quieter, it spun differently, and nobody could read it. Satoh beat Reisman and went on to win the world title.
Reisman called the sponge fraud and deception. He refused to use it. And that was the end of him as an international player — not because he lost, but because he would not adopt the thing that beat him. He spent the rest of his life as hardbat’s chief evangelist, running the Riverside Table Tennis Club on 96th Street where Dustin Hoffman, Bobby Fischer and Kurt Vonnegut turned up to play.
A man destroyed by an equipment change he considered morally illegitimate. That is a purpose story with no villain in it, and it is stranger and sadder than anything a hustle plot can carry.
Why it belongs in this project
Because Marty Supreme is the one in the set that looks like fun. The hustle here has a pulse to it — the vitality of caring about something absurd so completely that it becomes your whole world. Ping-pong is a small thing to give a life to, which is precisely the point: the size of the arena has nothing to do with the size of what gets spent in it.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote the best thing anyone has written about this, and it is about cockfighting in Bali. He borrowed a phrase from Jeremy Bentham — deep play, which Bentham coined to condemn gambling where the stakes are so high that playing is irrational. Geertz turned the judgement around. What looks economically stupid is a status bloodbath: the money is not what is at risk, honour is. The cockfight, he wrote, is “a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves.”
Erving Goffman, writing in the same year, called it action — consequential chance-taking you volunteer for, where “character is gambled.” He knew what he was talking about; he dealt blackjack in Las Vegas on sabbatical to find out.
A basement full of men playing table tennis for money is a place where character is gambled in public. That is why it carries more weight than it should.
Where this comes from
- Marty Supreme — Wikipedia — cast, credits, festival and release dates
- Josh Safdie interview — Dazed — “my entry point into the world”
- Safdie and Bronstein on the film’s origins — Deadline
- Who was the real Marty Supreme? — Table Tennis England
- The Real Marty Supreme — Defector — the fullest account of Reisman’s life
- How Marty Reisman Revolutionized Table Tennis — Smithsonian
- Marty Reisman, The Money Player (1974) — the book Safdie was given
- Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”, Daedalus (1972)
- Erving Goffman, “Where the Action Is,” in Interaction Ritual (1967)
One correction worth keeping straight: sources disagree on Reisman’s title count — you will see both 18 and 22 “majors” — and at least one outlet gives his age at the 1997 hardbat win as 77. He was born in February 1930, so he was 67.