Let me start with a nitpick: Marty Supreme is not, as commonly reported, Josh Safdie’s solo directorial debut. That would be The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a modest, mumblecore-era gem released in 2008, long before Josh and brother Benny became known for directing white-knuckle crime thrillers like Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). Made on a shoestring budget with a cast of unknowns, Pleasure followed the misadventures of a young kleptomaniac (Eleonore Hendricks) in Bloomberg-era New York. Few saw it in 2008, but those who did sensed a budding talent.

About 17 years and $70 million in budget separates Pleasure from Safdie’s exhilarating new film, Marty Supreme, but the director’s guiding ethos remains much the same: concoct characters driven by reckless and addictive behavior, have them make one bad decision after another, let their thrumming anxiety drive the tone of the film, and fill out their world with quintessentially New York wackos and greaseballs. That style has proven divisive — Slate‘s Dana Stevens described the Safdies’ philosophy as a belief that cinema ought to “transfer the anxieties of a film’s characters onto its audience” — but has also made Josh and Benny indispensable figures in the cinema of fuck-ups and dirtbags.

And sports cinema has never met a dirtbag quite like Marty Mauser, the aspiring table tennis champ at the center of Marty Supreme. Played with a manic, inexhaustible energy by Timothée Chalamet (and loosely based on real-life ping-pong wiz Marty Reisman), Marty is a swaggering narcissist, a guy who’ll steal anything and use anybody to fulfill his dreams. In the frenetic open sequences, Marty knocks up his mistress, Rachel (a scene-stealing Odessa A’zion); steals $700 from his boss at a Manhattan shoe store; and, desperate for glory, jets off to London to compete in the British Open.

Table tennis is hardly a major attraction in the film’s 1950s milieu, but Marty believes he can will wealth and fame into existence by sheer force. He stays in opulent hotels whether he can afford to or not. “I have a purpose,” Marty informs Rachel. “It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through, and with that obligation comes sacrifice.” Meanwhile, in London, he loses the British Open to a Japanese champ named Koto Endo but becomes smitten with a glamorous movie star named Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s just bored enough with her wealthy industrialist husband to submit to Marty’s aggressive advances.

When both halves of a filmmaking duo go solo, as the Coens did earlier in the decade, you start to see who contributed what to the partnership. Marty Supreme makes clear that Josh Safdie had much to do with the relentless anxiety buzzing through Good Time and Uncut Gems. In a Safdie(s) movie, apartments exist to be trashed, relationships exist to be exploited, money exists to be robbed and then gambled away, and characters are always one step ahead of repercussions catching up to them.

With a bigger budget, more breathtaking set pieces, and a more heightened sense of reality, Marty Supreme replicates the sweatily frenetic tone of its predecessors, the perpetual sense of walls closing in. Marty spends much of the movie on the run — quite literally, in one mesmerizing sequence — whether from cops, aggravated gangs, or the consequences of his self-serving actions. Stress levels rise exponentially after he becomes embroiled with a gravel-voiced criminal goon named Ezra, whose poor dog Marty loses, then tries to find, then pretends to find in order to collect the reward money anyway.

Safdie’s unorthodox approach to casting also distinguishes this from your typical Hollywood sports epic. In the 2010s, he and Benny filled their movies with first-time actors like Arielle Holmes, a recovering addict who played a heightened version of herself in Heaven Knows What, and Kevin Garnett, the NBA star who played himself in Uncut Gems. Prizing authenticity over experience, Safdie has a keen eye for the dilapidated faces of New York weirdos seemingly plucked off the street, like the character actor Mitchell Wenig, who played one of the sleazy creditors in Uncut Gems, and here returns as Ezra’s henchman.

Marty Supreme: Abel Ferrara

Meanwhile, the prolific indie director — a man not normally associated with $70-million productions — is raspy and revelatory as Ezra, Paltrow summons an aura of fading Hollywood glamour in her best film role in perhaps two decades, and rapper Tyler, the Creator pops up intermittently as Marty’s ping-pong sidekick Wally. In another meta-casting touch, real-life multimillionaire businessman Kevin O’Leary oozes old-money sleaze as Kay Stone’s husband, Milton Rockwell, a rapacious capitalist who becomes Marty’s strings-attached benefactor. It is a bizarrely eclectic cast, and fully fits with Safdie’s anything-goes approach.

Though Marty Supreme is set in the early 1950s, and the lingering trauma of the Second World War is a recurring theme, Safdie is not interested in a literal depiction of the era — at least not beyond Jack Fisk’s remarkable production design, which recreates Lower East Side storefronts, stockrooms, and apartments of the time. The script is littered with contemporary slang, like “Hell, yeah!” or “narcissistic prick,” phrases that didn’t enter the popular lexicon until considerably later. And the sound is defined by the woozy, synthetic glow of Daniel Lopatin’s score, which glistens with Reagan-era synths and mallet strikes resembling ping-pong serves, and imbues Marty’s travels with the sense of a mystical quest. (There are also several joyously anachronistic ’80s needle drops, which I won’t spoil.)

Among its myriad other qualities, Marty Supreme is also the most unabashedly Jewish movie to light up the holiday box office since, well, Uncut Gems. Which is not to say it’s a flattering portrayal of our tribe. Marty emerges from the Lower East Side of garment workers and tenement-style apartments; he yearns to up his station in life, to move his mother to a Fifth Avenue apartment, and behaves ruthlessly and unscrupulously in order to achieve that. He has the love (or lust) of childhood friend Rachel but, like a protagonist in a Philip Roth novel, craves the forbidden Shiksa blonde instead.

Wearing a Star of David necklace around his neck, Marty regards his fellow Jews not as comrades but as obstacles blocking his path to greatness. Blustering to reporters about a competing player, a Hungarian Jew who survived Nazi imprisonment, he boasts, crudely, “I’m gonna do to Kletzski what Auschwitz couldn’t.” He adds: “I’m Jewish, I can say that.”

For Marty, it takes more than skill (though he has plenty) but also considerable chutzpah and callous arrogance to achieve what he sees as his destiny. So no, not a flattering depiction of a Jewish-American striver, but Marty Supreme offers an intoxicatingly rich portrait of postwar ambition — of how Jews and other oppressed groups saw athletic excellence as a means to transcend their low social stature and fulfill the American dream.

With Safdie’s camera volleying queasily back and forth, the game scenes are riveting in their own way, not only for the virtuosic sportsmanship on display (Chalamet reportedly spent years taking ping pong lessons) but for the extravagant sets and glimpses of the crowd, electrified by each slam of the paddle. Marty finally gets his rematch with Endo during a climactic sequence in Tokyo. Each time Endo scores a point, the Japanese spectators erupt in ecstasy, signifying a wounded nation seeking to regain its pride after the trauma of the war. A whiff of American exceptionalism animates Marty’s quest as well, but the player worships at the altar of a greater god than national unity — his own ego.

Marty Supreme (★★★★☆) is Rated R and is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.