The Timothée Chalamet-starring comedy about a hustling table tennis ace has been voted one of the Guardian’s films of the year. Its writer/director talks ambition, American dreams and alien takeovers

• Why Marty Supreme is the No 5 film in the UK and No 4 in the US

Josh Safdie, 41, is best known for the films he has made with his brother, Benny – frenetic chancer yarns such as Uncut Gems, Good Time and Heaven Knows What.

Last year, the brothers split and shot separate movies loosely based on real life sportsmen. Benny made wrestling drama The Smashing Machine, starring The Rock; Josh a loose take on the life of Marty Reisman, a shoe-store clerk in 1950s New York, who aspires to table tennis pre-eminence but must hustle to fund his passage to championships in London and Tokyo.

Timothée Chalamet’s live-wire striver using ping pong as his ticket out of normie American life is just one of many wonders in this extraordinarily rich tale
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When reports started to emerge that Timothée Chalamet was going to play a ping pong champion in a film called Marty Supreme, the world (including this correspondent) rolled its eyes. Was Hollywood’s most annoying actor going to go for broke in what promised to be the most irritating film of all time? Well I am here to hold up my hand and say that first impressions couldn’t have been more wrong. Marty Supreme is one of the most exciting, indeed sensational films of the year, and if the Guardian film critics’ poll wasn’t a democracy, many of us would made it No 1 by some distance.

For it turns out that Marty Supreme is a character drama of quite remarkable richness, its excitement and sensation deriving from the nervous energy of its protagonist – who is indeed a ping pong player called Marty – but plying his trade in the decidedly non-quirky early 1950s where our hero, played by Chalamet, is essentially trying to use this non-traditional sport to plot a way out of the dullness and grind of his normie life, where he is on track to become a manager of a shoe store. Marty (whose last name is not actually Supreme, but the amusingly alliterative Mauser) is a pretty dislikable individual: happy to abandon a girl he gets pregnant, throw a fit when he loses a match, and think he can talk his way out of any kind of difficulty. But such is his verve, charisma and never-say-die attitude, he carries you with him.