Justin Chang

The real-life table tennis star Koto Kawaguchi plays a Japanese champ who beats Marty in London and leaves him spoiling for a rematch.

And Geza Roerig, from the Holocaust drama Son of Saul, pops up as Marty's friend Bela Kletsky, a ping-pong champ who survived Auschwitz.

Bella tells his story in one of the film's best and strangest scenes, a death camp flashback that proves crucial to the movie's meaning.

In one early scene, Marty brags to some journalists that he's Hitler's worst nightmare.

It's not a stretch to read Marty Supreme as a kind of geopolitical parable, culminating in an epic table tennis match, pitting a Jewish player against a Japanese one, both sides seeking a hard-won triumph after the horrors of World War II.

The personal victory that Marty seeks would also be a symbolic one, striking a blow for Jewish survival and assimilation,

and regeneration.

I haven't yet mentioned a crucial subplot involving Marty's close friend Rachel, terrifically played by Odessa Azion, who's carrying his child and gets sucked into his web of lies.

Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and co-edited the film with Ronald Bronstein, doesn't belabor his ideas.

He's so busy entertaining you, as Marty ping-pongs from one catastrophe to the next, that you'd be forgiven for missing what's percolating beneath the movie's hyperkinetic surface.

Marty himself, the most incorrigible movie protagonist in many a moon, has already stirred much debate.

Many find his company insufferable and his actions indefensible.

But the movies can be a wonderfully amoral medium.

And I found myself liking Marty Mouser.

And not just liking him, but actually rooting for him to succeed.

It takes more than a good actor to pull that off.

It takes one of the greats.

Anyone will tell you that these are tumultuous, borderline apocalyptic times for the film industry.

Box office is down.

The threat of AI looms.