‘Marty Supreme’ Bears Us Into The New World

Marty Supreme’s title card is a stream of sperm swimming up a vaginal canal. They fertilize an egg, which becomes a white Marty Supreme ping-pong ball and soars down toward a primordial green table. Ball is life, indeed! 

The progenitor of said sperm, 23-year-old Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), has just slept with his childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) in the storeroom of his uncle’s shoe store. Marty is already an international ping-pong star, but ping-pong doesn’t pay the bills, so meanwhile he lives rent-free with his mother (Fran Drescher) and Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman), slings wingtips, and has an affair with the married Rachel. He’s slated to compete in the 1952 British Open, but Murray owes him $700 in pay that will get him to London. To secure it, he stages an armed robbery of his coworker Lloyd (Ralph Colucci), the first of many escalating schemes to fund his table tennis career and, more immediately, his bid for the 1952 World Championship in Tokyo.