Marty Supreme is a tribute to the movie star – not as a figment of the past but as a vital and vibrant part of our future. In the face of Last Movie Star films like F1, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and The Rip, it offers a New Movie Star film, with Timothee Chalamet, and his alter-ego Marty Supreme, at the heart of it all. No sooner have we met Marty, an aspiring table tennis player roughly based on Marty Reisman, than we zoom inside his body and follow his most intrepid spermatozoon as it makes its way to the egg of his sometime-girlfriend, Rachel Mizler, played by Odessa A’zion, as Alphaville’s “Forever Young” plays out in all its glory. This is the cosmic youth of the classical movie star, the perennial freshness of a James Dean or Montgomery Clift, and it paves the way for the apotheosis of the Safdie aesthetic. There’s still the same fractious energy, still the same fixation with people yelling over each other, but it’s suffused with a new sense of flow and purpose, and perhaps more importantly, a complete belief in its own vision that tallies with Marty’s belief in himself.

For Marty already sees himself as a star, and spends much of the film insisting on his own singularity: “I need to tell you something and I don’t mean it as an insult. I have a purpose. You don’t.” To some extent he is a familiar figure in a world of influencers, given his insatiable self-promotion and self-marketing: “I’m interested in any opportunity to show off my talents.” Yet Safdie is doing something more than merely reflecting our modern influencer ecology – he is attempting to recover genuine stardom from mere “influence” and wrest the romance of the big screen back from the deluge of pseudo-celebrities in digital media. Hence the spectrum between Chalamet’s viral promotions for the film, so attuned to TikTok and Instagram reels, and his incredible, larger-than-life performance in it. Watching the film, I realized how much influencer culture lacks self-belief – it’s either people trying to convince themselves of their worth, or cynically monetising roles they don’t believe in. By contrast, beneath all his proto-influencer self-promotion, Marty believes in himself, to the point where the idea of not succeeding simply cannot occur to him. He spends much of the film trying to get his family and the world to invest in a future that he already manifests and inhabits; he may be living in the 1950s but the soundtrack to his life is already in the futuristic 80s evoked by Daniel Lopatin’s score, making him a man out of time.

The allure and aura of big screen charisma is represented, in the film, by Kay Stone, a retired Hollywood actress from the 1930s, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Kay is the first person who steals Marty’s spotlight – he’s being interviewed in the lobby of the London Ritz and the interviewer breaks away from him to gaze upon Kay as she walks towards the elevator. Marty immediately calls her, in an effort to absorb her aura, and she catalyses his transition from influencer to actor, in some cases quite literally, as when he turns up in the wings of one of her plays, bursts out to give her and the cast notes, and is rewarded by her suggestion that he should play her co-lead. So many scenes in the film evoke this world of people watching in the dark, waiting in the wings, eyes directed at a spectacle that hasn’t yet materialised. It reminded me of the opening poem in Hart Crane’s The Bridge: “I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights/With multitudes bent towards some flashing scene/Never disclosed but hastened to again/Foretold to other eyes on the same screen.” Marty Supreme continually coalesces around a cinematic screen that transcends the characters, as if Safdie is searching through their lives for the key to reinvigorating cinema in the present.

It’s notable, then, that while the brothers have gone their separate ways, both Josh and Benny remain focused on large-scale spectacle that people watch in the dark – table tennis in Marty Supreme, and MMA fighting in The Smashing Machine. Even when table tennis isn’t occurring, Josh’s camera is continually sweeping across vivid, sensuous, languorous crowds. In that sense the Safdies makes sense as metamodernist directors, since their aim is to renew cinema as mass modernist spectacle while inflecting it through the peculiarities of the present. Where Josh distinguishes himself is in the sheer dynamism and exhilaration of his mise-en-scenes, which, like the table tennis games themselves, are tight and hyper-kinetic while gesturing towards a more mercurial and subliminal space at their fringes. At the same time, Marty Supreme is full of great interludes that are simultaneously sprawling and kinetic, baggy and suspenseful, suffusing it with the lived-in quality of New Hollywood. Several of these, appropriately enough, revolve around a gangster played by Abel Ferrara, a director who, perhaps more than any other, embodied the transition out of New Hollywood, and whose body of work traces out the continuum between the 70s and contemporary film.

This insatiable energy also makes Marty Supreme the apotheosis of the Jewish remasculation narratives that have fueled so much of the Safdie universe. It’s particularly pointed here since the action takes place in the immediate aftermath of World War II and its decimation of the Jewish body politic. When Marty first meets businessman Milton Rockwell, played by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, he’s sitting with Bela Kletzki, a table tennis champion and Holocaust survivor played by Geza Rohrig. Upon seeing the tattoo etched on Kletzki’s inner arm, Milton responds, disdainfully and dismissively, “My son died liberating you people.” By contrast, Marty buoys himself up with provocative quips about World War II, branding himself as “the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat” because “I’m here, I’m on top.” As with Uncut Gems, Safdie distinguishes Jewish whiteness from contemporary American whiteness, aligning Judaism with the potency of African American culture (Tyler the Creator has a substantial role as Marty’s friend Wally) by tracing both to the African continent. When he visits Egypt, Marty chips off a fragment of one of the pyramids and brings it home to his mother, reminding her that “we built that.” Possibly the most audacious moment in the film comes when Keltzki recalls is time in a concentration camp, where his duties involved scouring the surrounding countryside for unexploded bombs, the rationale being that his body was expendable if one happened to go off. On one of his excursions he came across a beehive and rubbed honey all over his chest, keeping it concealed beneath his coat so his fellow prisoners could lick it off. In that veneration of the Jewish male torso, and in Safdie’s sensuous close-ups of saliva, honey and body hair, lies the core of the film’s paean to Jewish masculinity, the non-expendability of every Jewish body.

Around that honey-drenched chest, Safdie conjures up a multi-generational infrastructure of Jewish American celebrity, with Fran Drescher and Sandra Bernhard appearing in momentous bit roles, along with a host of other Jewish character actors, and Paltrow herself, part of a generation of actors that had to tacitly downplay their Jewish heritage to be palatable to the broadest American demographic. Just as Uncut Gems provocatively conflated Jews and Africans, Marty Supreme often converges Jews and the Japanese as sharing a certain kind of emasculation at the hands of World War II. While Marty ostensibly has his eyes set on Japan as the next site of the World Championships in table tennis, and the platform for announcing himself as the best player in the world, there is also a sense in which travelling to Japan means coming home to the emasculated diaspora that he and his fellow Jews inhabit. The same gallows humour that he brings to the Holocaust are also extended to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Holocaust, with Marty asserting he’s going to drop a “third atomic bomb” on his table tennis nemesis, just as he quips about his plans to defeat Kletzki, “I’m going to do to him what Auschwitz couldn’t.” In Safdie’s vision, post-war America exists as a sprawling, hyperkinetic stage between Europe and Japan, with the emasculated and decimated inhabitants of both watching on from the wings, waiting in both anticipation and apprehension, as the next half century of global spectacle unfolds.

That focus on spectacle drives the third act of the film, in which Marty finally agrees, after an initial refusal, to team up with businessman Milton Rockwell and play an advertisement game in Japan as a prologue to the World Championships. While Marty’s table tennis career has always verged on vaudeville – a wonderful early montage sequence follows him as he performs a series of increasingly absurd halftime shows for the Harlem Globetrotters – Milton’s patronage represents a new era of corporate entertainment. For one thing, Marty has to lose the game to a Japanese player in order to ensure the engagement of the Japanese consumer community. For another thing, indignity is central to the spectacle – he’ll be forced to kiss a pig when he loses, and Milton only accepts his about-face after being permitted to slap him on the backside with a table tennis bat in front of his executive board. Even worse, Marty finds out just before the event that he can’t play in the actual competition, partly because he has offended the aristocratic stylings of the sponsor and convenor. Given that Milton’s business is stationery, and Marty’s game is advertising a new brand of pen, it feels like the conditions for postmodern American are being written in this sequence – a manifesto for a world in which art, sport and business are entirely fused.

Marty’s decision to play to win is thus more than a romantic gesture – it’s Safdie’s tribute to aesthetic risk in the face of monetised spectacle, an allegory of the auteurist audacity it took to proffer Marty Supreme itself as a contender for blockbuster entertainment. By playing the game for keeps, and insisting upon his own vision, even if institutions reject him, even if it destroys him, Marty wrestles art from empty commercial spectacle, positioning himself against both the cultural capital represented by the head of the table tennis federation and the corporate capital represented by Milton. Apparently Safdie’s original ending involved Milton revealing himself as a vampire, and that sense of him as a supernatural foe, an embodiment of everything standing in the way of art, remains in his extraordinary final threat to Marty: “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries…You go out and win that game, you’re gonna be here forever too. And you’ll never be happy. You will never be happy.” In some sense, Milton is right. From here, Marty goes home, accepts his responsibilities as a father, and resigns himself to a life of domestic normality. Self-belief, it seems, is not enough, and in that sense Marty Supreme draws on a tried-and-tested cinematic critique of the American Dream.

But that’s not the final note. In the closing moments, Marty stares at his son, whose crying intensifies as Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” plays over the closing credits, bring us back to the expansive self-image of the Alphaville opening. Marty is constrained and humbled by having a child, but also ennobled and empowered by it, and that emotive oscillation makes it feel like the self envisaged by his self-belief still exists somewhere, more powerful in fantasy for the fact that it turned out to be untenable in reality. For Marty’s belief in himself, however impracticable it turns out to be, is also the dream of cinema: the fantasy of the movie star is of someone who dreams themselves into existence and allows us to remain living in that dream long after it has ceased to ramify for them. And that’s what happens in Marty Supreme – a proto-influencer transcends himself with dreams of stardom that fade for him, but whose afterglow keeps cinema’s dream alive.