"Marty Supreme". Curzon Westgate

Josh Safdie keeps making the same movie.

In 2017, Good Time was a techno-blasting surge of adrenaline that followed Robert Pattinson as a small-time crook making one terrible decision after another. Everything he tries backfires.

In 2019, Uncut Gems followed Adam Sandler as a gambling addict getting sucked into a criminal whirlpool of his own making. Terrible decisions pour out of him so quickly, it’s as if he’s hell-bent on his own destruction.

And now there’s Marty Supreme, in which Timothée Chalamet charges around New York, London and Japan making such terrible decisions that not only the audience but even the other characters in the film can barely believe how determined he is to screw up every opportunity that comes his way.

It all goes back, apparently, to Safdie’s chaotic upbringing, immersed in the turmoil of divorcee parents, constantly travelling between his Italian-Syrian-Sephardic father in Queens and his Ashkenazi mother in Manhattan. But Safdie’s therapy is our entertainment. His incessant urge to depict rootless Jewish chancers has birthed a body of work that is wild, dirty and morally bankrupt – just like the early films of Martin Scorsese.

Set in the early 50s, Marty Supreme takes us back to the Mean Streets of downtown Brooklyn, with Mafia henchmen skulking round every corner, and shady dives full of unlicenced… ping pong tables. Ping pong tables? Yes. Forget pool hustlers and sweat-drenched boxing gyms. In Safdie’s world the gangsters’ game is table tennis. And Chalamet, in a role partly built on the true-life adventures of table tennis champion Marty Reisman, is king of the wooden paddles. Convinced of his own sporting genius, gifted with a silver tongue and a quick brain, he wheedles, bullies and lies his way through life, trying to get a shot at the World Championship.

In Marty, Chalamet and Safdie have created a character who resists being appealing. He does have a cursory psychopathic charm. But Safdie insists on making him as objectionable as possible so that, if you do end up rooting for him, then you’re doing it because you’re sorry for him. He’s his own worst enemy – and that’s the demon Safdie is exorcising. His films are confessions of wrongdoing, and they don’t allow absolution, only degradation and shame. Marty Supreme is a ritual of self-flagellation: Jewish guilt externalised and turned into breakneck adventure. Like Howard in Uncut Gems, he doesn’t deserve to win, and victory is plucked from his grasp every time he thinks he’s clutching it.

Watching Chalamet is uncannily like watching the young Robert De Niro in those early Scorsese classics: a blend of natural brilliance and self-destructive tendencies. He’s got the cheeky, menacing charm of ‘Johnny Boy’ Civello in Mean Streets, the outsider mentality of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, the self-delusion of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, and the sporting prowess of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. But the Scorsese film that looms largest in Marty Supreme’s rear view mirror is 1985’s After Hours: a paranoid, anxiety-inducing nightmare of a man who goes out for the evening, and just can’t seem to get home. Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett finds himself flung from one bizarre situation to another as he desperately tries to survive a night that seems to go on forever, just like Marty bouncing between psychotic farmers, voracious film stars and condemned bathtubs as he hunts down the money he needs to get to Japan.

In fact Scorsese’s presence is so palpable that Marty Supreme almost feels more like a homage to the great director than a film in its own right. Scorsese himself produced it, and it features many of his pals in cameo roles: David Mamet as a theatre director, Penn Gillette as the gun-toting farmer, Sandra Bernhard as the woman downstairs. The very title, Marty Supreme, is not just a label for the central character: it’s a blatant statement of adulation for Big Marty himself, Safdie’s mentor and friend.

Except… Safdie is no Scorsese. And the key difference between them is that Scorsese’s movies of the 70s and 80s were intricately constructed examinations of alienation. By placing oddballs and outsiders at the heart of his films, he exposed the double standards, hypocrisy and heartlessness of American society. As a director he is cool, detached, in control. By comparison, Marty Supreme is a hot mess. Marty is both a victim and an abuser, a hero and a villain. One minute we want him to win, the next we dismiss him as author of his own failures. But contradiction does not equal complexity, and the constant yanking of audience sympathies from one extreme to the other ultimately leads to a hyperkinetic cancelling out, and we’re left with a bewildering absence of any perspective at all.

Because this film is trying to say one thing, louder and louder, it doesn’t really have a plot as such. The traditional three-act structure (setup, confrontation, resolution) is notably absent. Instead it’s confrontation, confrontation, confrontation. Of course rules were made to be broken, and directors can make movies with any shape they wish. But you have to live with the consequences of your decisions. And Marty Supreme feels rootless, as if it’s searching for a shape as desperately as Marty is searching for 1500 dollars. His panic is reflected not just in the events, but in the very structure of the film itself. It’s form as meaning: the movie is an imprint of its main character’s DNA.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad – far from it. But it does mean it’s a slightly shapeless barrage of anxiety-inducing predicaments, each carrying the same jeopardy as the last, and all doing the same thing: challenging us to like Marty despite his faults.

Along the way, if you can pause to breathe, there are fascinating details that flash past like tableaux on a ghost ride. One of the other table-tennis players, a Hungarian Jew who spent the war in Auschwitz (played by Géza Röhrig, star of the Auschwitz film Son of Saul), recalls how he once found a colony of honey-bees and smeared his body with honey, later allowing other prisoners to lick it off his torso. It’s a true story, and it slots neatly into a metaphorical leitmotif of human-on-human consumption that dots the film: Gwyneth Paltrow’s fading actress Kay Stone devours Marty during their love-making. And most bizarrely, the evil ink magnate, Milton Rockwell (played with reptilian brilliance by first-time actor Kevin O’Leary) confesses to being a vampire born in 1601.

Considering this is nominally a sports film, the sport itself takes a back seat to the other, more frenetic, action. But when there is table tennis, it is brilliantly depicted. CGI clearly had a big role to play, but the effect is completely persuasive. Chalamet’s smashes and scoops are athletic, balletic and increasingly fuelled by anger.

But there’s no sense that table-tennis really means anything to Marty, other than a way to assert his superiority. In Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell’s running is a God-sent power (‘He made me fast!’) In Raging Bull boxing is a caged expression of the violence that pervades La Motta’s life. Here he just picks up the paddle and plays. There’s something arbitrary at the heart of it all.

But perhaps the weakest moment comes in the final moments of the film, when Marty meets his own newborn baby. For the first time in his life, he breaks down and cries, realising that innocence and purity mean more than just beating the other guy. It’s a mis-step into crass sentimentality. And it blunts the sharp edge of Jewish guilt that cuts through the film’s first 239 minutes.

It remains to be seen whether Josh Safdie will keep making the same film, or if the plaudits that fall on Marty Supreme will finally enable him to put his conscience behind him and move on to new ground. This movie is fun, frenetic, film-award fodder. But it isn’t Scorsese’s sharp, critical eye on society. It’s a cry for help.