Looking at the two Josh Safdie’s films directed before Marty Supreme, they have a common trend which can be identified in this film pretty early on. They are films that are about a character trying to make his way in a world of bureaucracy, where confronting the systems of power are the only way for survival. The films don’t necessarily justify the actions or even give enough of a back story to the characters to their moral wrongdoing. What they do is illustrate a society were there a just winners and losers.
Marty, the main character here who is played by Timotheé Chalomet, has a conceited view to his own status where fame and the freedom it brings is only so far away. The mundanity of an every day life is what he wants to escape as he sees this as a failure. He wants to become a successful table tennis player, you feel mainly due to the wealth it will bring but on a deeper level it is about status and vain notoriety. The film makes the point that through the matches he plays both competitive and non-competitive, it isnt necessarily the sport that he is drawn to, but more the fact that people are coming to watch him.
Like his other films, this is in no ways a straight-forward success story. He is committing all these immoral acts but the whole point is that Josh Safdie wants to create another film where we feel his actions are justified because of the story he goes through and the means justifies the end, as we too as an audience have to endure what he has to. We are given a subjective look into his life, we don’t see the mothers side of the story and only follow his baby’s mothers (Odessa A’zion) story when he reenters her life and wants to use her for his own benefit. He is forever struggling to stay afloat with financial issues circling in on him and success fading away while the tainted outcome of selling out being closer to reality than he wants it to be. We as an audience hope for him to succeed not because we like him but when we are positioned from a subjective point of view of his story, he want a positive outcome more for our own piece of mind than anything else.