Is Marty Supreme based on a true story? The real-life hustler behind the Safdie brothers’ next obsession.
The Safdie brothers have never been especially interested in straight lines. Their films move in spirals — sweaty, chaotic, half-mythologised portraits of men running on pure nerve.
So when news broke that their next film, Marty Supreme, takes inspiration from a real person, it came with a very big asterisk.
Yes, Marty Supreme is loosely based on the life of Marty Reisman, a legendary American table tennis player. But if you’re expecting a clean-cut biopic that dutifully ticks off the milestones, you’re watching the wrong filmmakers.
Reisman was no ordinary athlete. Born in New York in the 1930s, he learned to play table tennis not in gyms or clubs, but hustling for cash in smoky pool halls, where games were fast, vicious, and often fuelled by desperation.
He went on to become a multiple-time national champion, later inducted into the USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame, but always carried the air of a gambler who’d never fully left the back room.
His career was also unusually long. Reisman kept competing well past the age most players retire, hanging on through stubbornness as much as skill, another sign that, for him, the game was never something you simply aged out of.
That contradiction – discipline forged in chaos – is catnip for the Safdies.
Rather than telling Reisman’s story beat for beat, Marty Supreme appears to borrow the mythos: the outsider grind, the obsession with mastery, the way sport becomes survival rather than spectacle.
Names are changed, events are reshaped, and the character of Marty Supreme exists somewhere between fact and fever dream.
In other words, it’s “based on a true story” in the same way Uncut Gems was about basketball, or Good Time was about crime – truth filtered through anxiety, momentum, and cinematic sweat.
This approach also sidesteps the trap of reverence. Reisman himself was famously unimpressed with authority, often clashing with official sporting bodies and resisting changes he felt softened the sport.
He was a vocal defender of old-school table tennis and never quite embraced the modernised version of the game – a stubbornness that mirrors the film’s resistance to neat arcs and polite messaging.
Reisman also had a habit of myth-making. He was a storyteller who leaned into bravado when recounting his hustling days, blurring fact and exaggeration in a way that makes the film’s loose relationship with reality feel less like distortion and more like inheritance.
Reisman passed away in 2012 at the age of 81, leaving behind a legacy as a fiercely independent competitor and one of the sport’s most colourful characters.
What’s compelling is how Marty Supreme reframes table tennis – a sport rarely granted cinematic gravitas – as something brutal, psychological, and intensely personal.
Fast, claustrophobic, and unforgiving, it becomes the perfect Safdie arena. A ping-pong table turns into a hustle, a pressure cooker. Winning isn’t about trophies; it’s about staying alive, staying sharp, staying ahead.
So, is Marty Supreme a true story? Not exactly. But it’s rooted in a very real life – one that already blurred the line between sport, survival, and self-mythology.
And honestly, that feels truer to the Safdie brothers than facts ever could.
