This past winter break, I was avoiding graduate school applications, as one does, by looking through ridiculous spats on X-formerly-Twitter-dot-com, when I saw something that made my blood run cold. “Art and athletics don’t mix . Sorry .It’s icky .” user @Maria_Mouskos said, to the tune of nearly 4 million views. “Oh no,” I thought, “The general public has finally decided to (not unreasonably) oust figure skating from the Winter Olympics.” Fortunately for me, the target of ire was not, in fact, the greatest artistic medium ever conceived by man, but white boy rapper and current Kylie Jenner beau, Timothee Chalamet. 

It soon became clear that, in a sort of persona-building marketing ploy, Chalamet was using ungainly sports analysis terminology to both metatextually reference the gamification of art (think of the obsessive Oscars prediction games, or the concept of Kalshi) and promoting his latest film (ping-pong epic “Marty Supreme”). “I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight,” he said in an acceptance speech last year at the SAG Awards, alluding to the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) debates popularized by sports fandom and loosely credited to boxer Mohammad Ali. User @kishswim, in a tweet with over 80 thousand likes, succinctly called it “athlete mentality.” My interest was piqued, and I hate gambling with a passion on principle. I therefore resolved to see “Marty Supreme.”

Directed by Josh Safdie (his first film since professionally splitting with brother Benny Safdie in 2024), “Marty Supreme” is a 150-minute thrill ride loosely based on the life of American table tennis star Marty Reisman. Smart-mouthed shoe salesman and table tennis prodigy Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet) attempts to win glory and wealth through the sport’s World Championship, only to be felled by a cartoonishly austere Japanese rival, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi). Refusing to accept his defeat, Marty tears through everyone in his life to get back to Worlds—his beleaguered mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher), his very pregnant childhood friend and mistress Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), washed up film star Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow), Kay’s vampirically wealthy benefactor husband Milton (Kevin O’Leary), scam partner Wally (Tyler, the Creator), the star-studded cast goes on—leaving a trail of death, property damage and neon orange balls in his wake. 

The plot, if it exists, is haphazard mania, driven more by a series of coincidental and mundane catastrophes than clear narrative development. Police chase! Ceiling collapse! Dognapping! Gas fire! Jewelry theft! Kevin O’Leary spanking Timothee Chalamet with a custom ping pong paddle! All of it is held together only by Chalamet—no, Marty—no, Chalamet attempting to talk, talk, talk himself out of the fire and into the echelons of sporting greatness. Just give me one chance, he says. One match, one tournament, one championship is all he needs.

So back to our guiding question: do art and athletics mix? On some level, this hubbub is absolutely ridiculous. The question isn’t whether sport belongs in art, it’s whether sport is just art. Sport, at its core, is about entertainers, a congregation of individuals so single-mindedly devoted to glory and distinction and self-realization that they sacrifice everything else—family, friendship, money, romance, morality and, most of all, their own bodies. Think of the praise we heap on athletes who break themselves for victory: gymnast Kerri Strug, for example, became an American hero by destroying her ankle doing a vault to secure a gold medal that was already mathematically won (this story, coincidentally, is also about to become cinema). But that moment, that irrational, sacrificial, against-the-odds success transcended any silly notions of objective fact or utilitarian logic—narrative needs not concern itself with reality.

That’s why this movie works. In complete opposition to the kitschy, feel-good Hollywood-about-Hollywood movies like “La La Land” or even this year’s ultimately droll “Hamnet,” “Marty Supreme” eschews any facade of nobility or social good in favor of laying bare the antisocial, self-destructive nature of art. Sport (which is, in many ways, self-imposed harm) is the perfect subject for a reflexive film; a purely irrational pursuit that draws out humanity’s nastiest, most selfish impulses in pursuit of an almost divine catharsis. It’s humiliation, it’s exploitation, it’s ruthlessly mining the people around you—including, most of all, yourself—for everything they have, just in hopes of maybe, maybe producing the one pièce de résistance that makes everything worth it. Nothing is sacred.

Every cylinder is firing: the breakneck, cortisol-spiking edit driving both Marty and the viewer towards that one singular grail, the grotesque close-ups of body parts and functions serving as a constant reminder of our shackling to base human instinct, the genuinely thrilling cinematic recreations of just straight table tennis. Like its narrative, these formal elements are sublimated within a pretty conventional sports movie structure (‘have to win the big game!’) that plays its cards exactly right. The climactic triumph hits like a first high, a kind of movie magic only possible before you knew what genre conventions were. 

Each actor, too, is a perfect blend of self-conscious celebrity persona and archetypal character. On the topic of the classical Hollywood movie star, James Baldwin, in “The Devil Finds Work,” said it best: “No one, for example, will ever really know whether Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis or Humphry Bogart or Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable—or John Wayne—can, or could, really act, or not, nor does anyone care: acting is not what they are required to do…One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” 

That’s exactly what happens here, from Gwyneth Paltrow’s effortlessly glamorous take on the tragic, aging starlet, to Odessa A’zion’s turn as the duplicitous mistress unsure how to produce her own misery (she figures it out, for the worse). I don’t have any particular love for Timothee Chalamet nor any opinions on previous alleged awards season snubs, but his performance here is undeniable. This shrimpy, pimply, motormouthed kid unable to envision a future without extraordinary fame, this is what I go to watch him be.