Timothée Chalamet wants to be great. ‘Marty Supreme’ might get him there

“Now in my late 20s, there should be every reason to go, ‘All right, career’s good. Let me start shilling out,’” says Chalamet, who turns 30 just after Christmas. “But it’s like I’ve quadrupled down on the original pursuit of my life. I’ve gotten out of the pool and redived from a higher board.”

That high dive is “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s hyperkinetic 1950s-set New York tale of a singular striver. Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a Jewish kid working at a shoe store who aspires to be the best table tennis pro in the world. The character is loosely based on a real-life player, Marty Reisman, but the movie is just as much a reflection of Chalamet and Safdie’s own whatever-it-takes ambitions.

“The gift of my life is this work,” Chalamet says while seagulls fly overhead. “You want to honor it. Not in some Keynesian way — I don’t know if that’s the right economist to cite. Capitalistic is not what I mean. I mean: If you’re not going up, you’re kind of going down. ‘He not busy being born is busy dying,’ the great Dylan quote. Ooh, is that on the money.”

Since his breakthrough performance in 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name,” Chalamet has been on an ever-ascending path that seemed to reach a culmination when he, soon after finishing shooting on “Marty Supreme,” declared that he’s “in pursuit of greatness” while accepting the best actor award from the Screen Actors Guild for his performance as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.”

But “Marty Supreme” is yet another new level for Chalamet. His Marty, far from a period-piece study, is a blur of forward motion. (To shoot the film’s sprinting poster, Safdie closed down two blocks, so Chalamet would be up to full speed.) To make his dreams a reality, Marty uses every desperate scheme and every bit of grandiose swagger. He's a quintessentially American hustler, and it’s probably the defining performance of Chalamet’s young career. A year after he came so close, it may win him his first Academy Award.

“It’s not like a long arc thing for me,” he says. “It’s like I’m chasing a feeling.”

Taking ‘Marty’ mainstream

“Marty Supreme,” which opens wide Thursday, is a big test. A24 spent some $70 million on it, making it one of the indie studio’s biggest budgeted movies ever. To build the hype, Chalamet has unveiled some very Marty-esque stunts, including an 18-minute video of a pseudo-Zoom call about the movie’s marketing. That led to a real orange blimp, emblazoned with “Dream Big,” flying over Los Angeles.

When The Associated Press caught up with Safdie at his Chelsea office, he had recently returned from promoting the movie in London, Brazil and Los Angeles. For him, “Marty Supreme” could hardly be more personal. Pingpong paddles filled his office, as did an old piece of awning scrounged from Rodney Dangerfield’s New York comedy club. Safdie once tried to turn pro at table tennis, himself, before moviemaking became his obsession.

“My dad is the ultimate dreamer,” Safdie says. “He still dreams to this day. When I was a kid, I’d ask him where I came from. And he’d say, ‘You came from the stars.’ It put this intense feeling inside me that there was huge future ahead of me.”

When Safdie and his brother, Benny, set out to make films, they had a New York hustler mentality. For their second feature, “Daddy Longlegs,” they approached the filmmaker Ronald Bronstein, then working as a projectionist, and told him he had to star in the film. Bronstein wasn't even an actor.

“I thought: This guy is made out helium and I’ve had my feet stuck in lead for six years,” recalls Bronstein, who co-wrote “Marty Supreme.”

The hardscrabble life of independent filmmaking made Safdie accustomed to giving everything to get his movies made. To convince a potential financier to pay for the basketball portions of 2019's “Uncut Gems,” Safdie, a non-drinker, remembers downing half a dozen whiskies during a meeting.

“You’re in a position where you’re at their beck and call,” he says. “You’ll do whatever it takes.”

When Safdie and his brother finished “Uncut Gems,” years of pouring everything into Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler’s character in the film) left him feeling purposeless. “You start to ask yourself: What is the purpose of a dream?”

‘Timmy Supreme’

Safdie and Chalamet first met back in 2017, at the premiere of “Good Time,” just months before the release of “Call Me By Your Name.”

“I didn’t know anything about the guy. Some agent told me he was the next big superstar. And you hear that a lot from agents,” says Safdie. “But you got the sense that he saw it. And he had a vision for it. He had this energy to him. He was Timmy Supreme.”

Safdie sent Chalamet a video of table tennis players from 1948 set to Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch.” The suggestion was: This is a period movie told with contemporary topspin. For years, while working on other movie sets, Chalamet built up his table tennis skills.

“Josh wanted me to tap into a period of my life when my audacity was all I had,” Chalamet says. Immediately, he saw himself in Marty. “I was singularly driven starting at 14.”

Safdie and Chalamet are now launching something almost anathema in theaters this holiday season: a wholly original, big-budget, R-rated movie fronted by star power. Signs suggest audiences aren’t just ready, they’re hungry for it. The limited opening of “Marty Supreme,” in six cinemas, set per-screen records. There were 92 sellouts.

“I said this when I went to (former high school) LaGuardia last year: Don’t act for other actors. Act for real audiences,” Chalamet says. “While we were shooting ‘Dune 3’ over the summer, Denis (Villeneuve) said at some point he realized it was more about pleasing real people. You look at the business structure of the film industry, how it’s been contracting since the ’80s, it’s ludicrous to be focused on anything but real audiences.”

“I’d love to see more original movies made,” adds Chalamet. “They’re the most exciting ones to see. Every original film I’ve seen this year, I like it before I even start it. That’s a whole new mentality I’ve had, just feeling like we’re all in this together.”

New York hustle

“Marty Supreme” is also a part of the proud lineage of New York movies, and self-consciously crafted in an American movie tradition. It may feel like a millennial watershed, but its production design is by a legend of an earlier era, Jack Fisk. The 74-year-old Bronx filmmaker Abel Ferrara appears in it. They're veterans of a grittier, more handcrafted time stretching back to the 1970s that's been particularly influential to Safdie. Robert Altman’s 1902-set 1971 film “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” he notes, is the exact same time difference between when it takes place and when it was shot as “Marty Supreme.”

“The tradition, particularly of New York filmmaking, movies like ‘French Connection,’ I try to let them seep into me,” Safdie says. “That’s why I’m casting Abel Ferrara. I’m trying to at least cultivate those influences.”

That “Marty Supreme” is a deeply New York film, and maybe a new classic one, is also a special point of pride for Chalamet, who grew up in Hell's Kitchen. Leaning forward as the afternoon winter light brightens the waterfront, Chalamet remembers he used to play soccer as a kid on this pier.

“Just to be here, back where I’m from. What a dream,” Chalamet says. “I also feel like my artistry has grown, not as a talking point or as hyperbole, but as a humble fact of foundation.”

It’s the kind of thing Marty might say. Indeed, some of Chalamet’s recent declarations have struck some like he’s still in character. Asked whether he’s sincere or engaging in a little Method marketing, Chalamet takes a long pause and smiles. “It’s both.”