Ambition has become strangely unfashionable in contemporary culture. That full-bodied belief in striving has turned retro, almost gauche. In its place, humility has become the dominant aesthetic. Actors go on self-deprecating press tours, chalking up their success to “luck,” or joking that all they did was “show up on set.” They downplay their own work, but we’re expected to applaud. Since we’ve been drowning in modesty, a cultural craving has emerged for the pendulum to swing back. Back to ego. Back to hubris. Back to the shameless, wide-eyed pursuit of greatness.
Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme bursts through as a counterspell to our cultivated smallness. It’s a film unafraid of bigness, of risk, of sincerity. A film that believes in the American striver the way mid-century cinema believed in the dreamer. This is a movie about being great—not good—and the difference between those two words is the electric current running through every single frame. That charge comes from the person at the centre of it; an actor who has decided, somewhat controversially, to take greatness at face value.
Timothée Chalamet walks straight into this cultural allergy to ambition and becomes its antidote. In this 2024 SAG Awards speech, he proclaimed, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness.” In any other era, that sentence would’ve been boilerplate, something a young actor says before a lifetime of Method war stories and bad biopics. But in ours, it registered as arrogance, maybe even delusion. We’re so deep in the theatre of humility that a straightforward admission of desire feels transgressive. But Timmy won’t be silenced. He’s spent the past few weeks reinforcing it with action, most notably in the A24 marketing zoom call video. It’s not publicity fluff, it’s meta-performance: by publicly playing the inflated, over-the-top creative, Chalamet draws the boundary between genuine ambition and cynical hype and then arcs right over it. The marketing becomes part of the mythology, and the actor becomes part of his character’s ecosystem.
Watching Marty Supreme, it all clicks into place. He’s not bragging; he’s just living in the headspace of Marty Mauser. Marty’s entire worldview runs on unembarrassed ambition, and Chalamet plays him like someone who has already decided that greatness is his final destination. It’s the rare performance where the actor’s off-screen conviction and the character’s on-screen idealism line up to create something vitalizing and magnetic. That alignment taps into a lineage that American cinema used to be fluent in. The hungry, fanciful go-getter with something to prove. There are flashes of early De Niro: the wiry alertness, the forward-tilted body as if ambition has a gravitational pull. There’s early DiCaprio too: Frank Abagnale Jr. realness, boyish confidence masking a desperate need to outrun insignificance. Chalamet doesn’t imitate these predecessors, but he shares their underlying appetite.
Marty Supreme gives Chalamet permission to act with velocity and assuredness, because Marty is a man who refuses a version of reality where he doesn’t win. When asked what he’ll do if his dream doesn’t work out, Marty replies, “That doesn’t even enter my consciousness.” To him, failure is something that happens to other people, people who didn’t want it badly enough.
Marty mythologizes his own life in real time: every conversation becomes a stepping stone, every small victory a prophecy, every setback a test designed specifically for him. His mindset is his grindset, but the tragedy is that the grind doesn’t love him back. It never has. But Marty keeps playing as if sheer conviction will bend fate to his side of the table.
The frantic self-certainty couldn’t exist without the direction of Josh Safdie. On his first major venture without his brother, he leads Marty Supreme with the kind of maximalist confidence that feels endangered in contemporary filmmaking. While most directors are chasing precision or polish, Safdie chases mess, mania, and momentum. Marty’s ambition is mirrored formally by Safdie’s vision, and the result is a movie that is structurally built around refusing defeat. The film carries the same sense of urgency as a game point rally. It doesn’t ease you in; it launches you into the serve from the first frame. If you thought the colonoscopy opening in Uncut Gems was bold, just wait until you witness the opening scene-to-title card transition in Marty.
Safdie matches that opening salvo with casting choices just as brazen. He stacks the film with a cast who arrive preloaded with their own mythologies. The most obvious meta-casting in Safdie’s ego pantheon is Kevin O’Leary as Milton Rockwell, a swaggering capitalist businessman; he enters the frame already symbolizing arrogant, bulletproof confidence. O’Leary quoted Safdie’s direction as, “Look, just be yourself and let’s see what happens.” And much to everyone’s chagrin, he’s actually great in the role. No acting necessary.
Gwyneth Paltrow as a matured, era-defining movie star who’s been out of the game but is making a bold return? It’s like she’s winking right at us. Safdie taps into Paltrow’s legacy, the aloof glamour, the effortless poise, the faint, cultivated haughtiness, and injects it into Kay Stone. And Paltrow delivers one of her most impressive performances since she was released from the iron grip of Marvel and Ryan Murphy.
And then Abel Ferrara appears like the ghost of ambition’s darkest timeline. As the volatile, unpredictable enforcer who derails Marty’s trajectory at the worst possible moments, Ferrara’s character is terrifying and tragic. His performance is more like an eruption, as if the sum total of his own filmmaking chaos—decades of brilliance, obsession, collapse—funnels into this one character.
But the film’s anchor is Odessa A’zion and her portrayal of Rachel, the only character chasing greatness emotionally rather than professionally. She wants to be part of Marty’s world so badly that her yearning becomes its own kind of ambition. It’s easy to misread her devotion as manipulation, but A’zion plays it as something far more interesting: a con of longing. If Marty is striving for greatness through sport, Rachel is striving for greatness through connection. She is trying to escape ordinariness by attaching herself to someone who refuses to be ordinary. She sees a life with Marty as its own form of ascension, and A’zion captures that hope with an aching, messy sincerity. Her performance makes clear that ambition isn’t just a competitive instinct, it’s a human one.
That’s the doorway into the film’s real subject: greatness as an American compulsion. And frankly, we don’t see movies about that anymore. We see movies about trauma, survival, perseverance. Fine virtues, sure. But the tale of the man who believes life is winnable if you go hard enough has been flattened into a cautionary tale. Marty Supreme dares to resurrect him, not as a hero, but as a figure worth taking seriously. The film understands that blind ambition isn’t a personality flaw, it’s a choice and a faith practice. Safdie reflects a world where striving still matters, where wanting something isn’t ‘cringe,’ and where hunger is a more honest engine than humility.
Culture has spent so much of this century sanding itself down, rounding off edges, pretending desire is inelegant. Marty Supreme rejects all of that. Chalamet reintroduces ego as a performance mode. Marty lives by it as a philosophy. Safdie films through it like it’s oxygen. Together, they make a movie that has the bones to be timeless, an abiding portrait of the American striver in all his restless ambition, righteous folly, and impossible desire.