Marty Supreme is truly incredible And yes, Timothée Chalamet should win the Oscar for his performance

Marty Supreme is a story that stretches from Forever Young to Everybody Wants to Rule the World. A direct line can be traced between the two songs that open and close the film. First of all, it must be said: the year of release has nothing to do with it. Both the synth-pop hit by Alphaville and the Tears for Fears anthem come from the musical universe of the Eighties, while the film written and directed by Josh Safdie (with Ronald Bronstein on the screenplay) is set in the early 1950s. And the musicality of the songs likely matters very little too: while they inevitably give a tone to the scenes they underscore, they are not used to dictate an atmosphere or a mood, but rather to locate the protagonist Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, in time and space.

Marty Supreme: plot and characters

A time and a place that do not belong to the diegetic coherence of the work, but to its narrative coherence, to the meaning the director wanted to give to the chapter of his ping-pong player. And Marty Mauser starts out as a young man, an eternal youth, a young man full of talent, a young man with the prospects of a champion, who believes he can set his own glory in time, challenge the best players in the world at the table and emerge victorious.

But the film also begins with a sexual encounter, with a quick tryst among shelves and shoeboxes in which the protagonist gets his childhood friend Clare (Odessa A’zion) pregnant. She is married, and the young man does not believe he is the father of the child she will have eight months later. Or at least, that is what he wants to believe.

The meaning of the Marty Supreme soundtrack

Forever Young is therefore the state in which we find the character: the winner at the peak not of success, but of potential, which is precisely what, when you are young, you can pursue, reach, and surpass. But it is also another beginning with which Safdie launches the sequence and, consequently, the film. In that moment of passion in the stockroom of Marty Mauser’s uncle’s shop, he and Claire conceive a new life that the filmmaker visually represents with the classic sperm cell racing forward to fertilize the egg.

That sperm cell, however, turns into the true symbol that will accompany the entire film: a ping-pong ball, white, ready to be colored orange in the film to match the boy’s dreams and desires. A transition that embraces the theme of the title, which is therefore ambivalent. On one side there is life, existence, growth, which demands certain responsibilities, such as the possibility of becoming a parent; on the other there is the protagonist’s goal, Marty Mauser’s ambition and his desire to become “Supreme”.

The film moves along its arc. Not exactly one of transformation, given the events that unfold, which are instead more disastrous situations the protagonist must somehow survive. And that is precisely the point. Josh Safdie’s character, for whom Chalamet deserves to win an Oscar, goes through a series of genuine adventures, of crazy events, wild, off the rails, closer to a Seventies punk film (and here, yet another decade) that turn the protagonist into a true rockstar despite not having achieved fame yet (and perhaps never will). And at the end of this parabola, Everybody Wants to Rule the World plays. Because that is where the character is aiming, and it is also where Timothée Chalamet himself seems to be aiming.

What does the ending of Marty Supreme mean?

In an epilogue in which Marty Mauser’s dreams of conquest seem increasingly distant, in which every certainty collapses and, with it, a trace of his brazen confidence, Safdie questions the audience through the Tears for Fears song. Who is it that wants to rule the world? Who can actually do it? Will that be Marty Mauser’s ultimate fate? At what could be a crossroads where the film leaves him, with a scene that was cut by the director and that would have taken the character into the future, the filmmaker allows each viewer to imagine their own ending and the moral they prefer for the path Marty Mauser has taken.

With Marty Supreme ending on a musical manifesto that sums up what the protagonist (and the viewer) has experienced and what the future might hold for him from that point on, or perhaps not. It is also an invitation to that sperm cell that became a fetus and then a child, for whom the first line of the song is sung: “Welcome to your life”.

Marty Supreme is a film whose two extremes, the beginning and the end, trace a parallel whose middle section is mad and reckless, yet proves coherent in how it opens and how it ultimately closes Marty Mauser’s story. From the feeling of being able to be young forever to wondering who, and how, we can govern our own fate. It may not be quite like ruling the world, but it is something.