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The Republican Susan Collins has held one of Maine’s Senate seats for nearly thirty years, and Democrats, in trying to take it away from her, have a lot at stake. Graham Platner, a combat veteran, political activist, and small-business owner who has never served in office, seemed to check many boxes for a progressive upstart. Platner, who says he and his wife earn sixty thousand dollars a year, has spoken passionately about affordability, and has called universal health care a  “moral imperative.” He seemed like a rising star, but then some of his past comments online directed against police, L.G.B.T.Q. people, sexual-assault survivors, Black people, and rural whites surfaced. A photo was published of a tattoo that he got in the Marines, which resembles a Nazi symbol, though Platner says he didn’t realize it. He apologized, but will Democrats embrace him, despite ugly former views? “As uncomfortable as it is, and personally unenjoyable, to have to talk about stupid things I said on the internet,” he told David Remnick, “it also allows me to publicly model something I think is really important. . . . You can change your language, change the way you think about stuff.” In fact, he frames his candidacy in a way that might appeal to disappointed Trump voters: “You should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person. You can think about the world in a different way.”

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Early in 2025, the staff writer Calvin Tomkins decided to chronicle turning a hundred in the same year as The New Yorker’s hundredth anniversary, in a piece titled “Becoming a Centenarian.” Tomkins first contributed to The New Yorker at the age of thirty-two, and he soon developed a specialty: writing about visual artists, and exploring the source of their originality. “I knew nothing about contemporary art. I had not intended to write about art or artists,” he said. “It just happened that way. It sort of took hold of me.” The first of these profiles was published in 1962, and they were eventually collected in the six-volume anthology “The Lives of Artists.” Just last year, nearing the age of ninety-nine, Tomkins wrote about Rashid Johnson, who was mounting a major survey at the Guggenheim Museum. David Remnick celebrates Tomkins’s life and career on the week of his hundredth birthday.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

In August, a retrospective of work by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, the collaborators behind Radiohead’s iconic visuals for more than thirty years, opened at the Ashmolean Museum, in England.

When I stepped off the train in Oxford, it was raining heavily, which felt fitting.

An informal poll of friends had revealed that many formative Radiohead concert experiences included a dramatically timed downpour.

I find that the most memorable art speaks directly to your present circumstances.

Yorke and Donwood have long kept their process shrouded in secrecy. That extends to Donwood’s identity: Stanley Donwood is a professional title (his real name is Dan Rickwood), and the art work has often been jointly credited to Donwood and Dr. Tchock, one of Yorke’s many aliases.

The pair maintained their air of mystery during the show’s opening reception.

Surrounded by decades of their work, they didn’t betray a shred of sentimentality, and joked about their recall of the pieces.

We were only briefly introduced.

The next morning, I headed to the lobby of the Store, a hotel in central Oxford, for a scheduled interview. The hotel is a short walk from the Jericho Tavern, where Radiohead played its first gig, in 1986, and around the corner from a now shuttered HMV, in whose aisles Donwood and Yorke once loitered, scouting the competition.

Thinking about this, while navigating streets lined with baroque architecture, teeming with teen-agers on academic tours, was like experiencing several time warps.

On arrival, I got straight to the point.

Yorke, dressed in cropped black pants and a gray T-shirt, peered through oversized black-framed glasses. Donwood had thick tortoise-shell frames, with a striped denim blazer over distressed jeans. A pink happy-face button was pinned to his lapel.

I had planned to draw their portraits as we talked. Conversation flowed easily, aided by the fact that we were all looking down, instead of at one another (something that I realized, too late, was not very conducive to portrait drawing).

They were polite.

And had a wry sense of humor.

We settled around a low table scattered with half-drunk cups of tea. Yorke’s wife, Dajana, was curled up next to him, engrossed in a Murakami novel. Nearby, the hotel bartender pulverized ice in the world’s loudest blender.

Since 2021, Yorke and Donwood have been represented by Tin Man Art, a gallery based in London and Hampshire, and have put on six joint exhibitions of archival and new works. This is a marked departure from their origins.

Yorke, who is most famous as Radiohead’s lead vocalist and songwriter, met the multidisciplinary artist Donwood at art college, in Exeter, in the nineteen-eighties. Displeased with the image that the record label had chosen for Radiohead’s début album, “Pablo Honey,” Yorke asked Donwood to collaborate on the art for their next project.

Since then, the duo has maintained control over all of the band’s visual content, producing art works for every album, as well as for Yorke’s solo projects.

“This Is What You Get” draws on a vast archive of objects and images from the mid-nineties to the present day. The show is not a history of Radiohead but an exploration of the art that helped define the band’s music, and which was often integral to the experience of being a fan. (Example: a booklet of art work concealed inside the walls of every “Kid A” CD case, accessible only by cracking it open.) The drawings that filled Yorke and Donwood’s sketchbooks became some of the band’s most iconic insignia, tattooed on arms and scribbled on three-ring binders.

I’ve most often encountered these images on a screen.

And so it came as something of a shock to discover the scale of the canvases.

The pair used a computer mouse and tablet to create the digital compositions for “The Bends” and “OK Computer.” In 1998, after several years of non-stop recording, touring, and skyrocketing fame, Yorke found his way back to drawing.

Landscapes have long found their way into Yorke and Donwood’s visual art; during lockdown, Donwood would take iPhone photos out in nature and print them on a small, thermal printer.

The art for each Radiohead album was created during the band’s marathon recording sessions, often in adjacent rooms of recording spaces.

For their recent paintings for the Smile, Yorke’s latest rock band, the pair was inspired by Arabic maps on display in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

The decision to paint with tempera, the same medium used to create those Arabic maps, proved fortuitous.

Paintings have formed the backbone of Radiohead’s imagery since “Kid A,” from 2001.

But Yorke and Donwood were always most interested in how these images could be reproduced: on products they designed, in guerrilla publicity campaigns, and online.

Over time, Yorke’s views on the original-versus-reproduction dichotomy have softened.

Yorke and Donwood first began to experiment with large, landscape-inspired paintings after Yorke’s time in Cornwall, but committed to the scale and medium after a visit to the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, where they saw David Hockney’s “A Bigger Grand Canyon.”

Six large canvases, painted shortly after this visit, were put up for auction at Christie’s, in 2021, to commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of “Kid A.” Four of the paintings sold for well over a hundred thousand pounds each, above reserve prices of ten thousand pounds.

Agreeing to a retrospective at the Ashmolean, an institution that has showcased the works of art stars such as Jenny Saville and Anselm Kiefer, would suggest that Yorke and Donwood’s attitude toward having their work in galleries has changed.

To me, the fixation on whether the work in “This Is What You Get” constitutes “fine art” or deserves to be in the Ashmolean seems rooted in a myopic definition of art.

To experience art is to take part in a conversation that transcends time and language.

The conversation can be misinterpreted and editorialized.

But it can also give shape to inarticulable feelings and memories.

It can give you permission to change your life.

At the end of our talk, Donwood had drawn a landscape. Yorke had drawn a lyrical abstraction.

I had drawn, more or less, what was directly in front of me.

The day after the interview, I took a train to Paris to visit the Fondation Louis Vuitton, where there was a huge David Hockney retrospective.

And saw “A Bigger Grand Canyon” with my own eyes.

Not long ago, I cared for a middle-aged man I’ll call Jim, who was generally healthy but had recently started to feel sluggish. One of his friends told him to try a hormone supplement. After Jim saw on social media that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Trump Administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, had endorsed supplements as a part of an “anti-aging” regimen, he ordered one from a telehealth company. A few months later, he noticed swelling and pain in his calf. ChatGPT warned him that he might have a blood clot. I met Jim for the first time in the emergency room. An ultrasound revealed a blockage in a leg vein, which could cause serious problems if it travelled to his lungs. He stopped the supplement and started a blood thinner.

What struck me about Jim’s case was that, until the moment he limped into the hospital where I work, his journey had taken place entirely outside of the traditional health-care system. He found a remedy through word of mouth; social media and the Make America Healthy Again movement lent credibility to it; and a direct-to-consumer company supplied it. A.I. diagnosed his blood clot—I only confirmed it. Jim hadn’t been seen by a doctor in years.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

For much of the past century, doctors had a near-monopoly on knowledge about and the provision of medical care. Patients had little choice but to turn to doctors, and doctors had little need to justify their gatekeeping role. But, today, many groups—A.I. startups, wellness influencers, longevity entrepreneurs, MAHA acolytes—are vying for medical authority, often by chipping away at that of doctors. In her best-selling book, “Good Energy,” Casey Means, Donald Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, wrote that the most meaningful days of her life “came from ignoring a team of doctors,” who had recommended that her mother try aggressive end-of-life cancer care. Means, who trained as a surgeon before turning to alternative medicine, suggested that her mother’s doctors were biased by financial interests. In February, Bill Gates said on “The Tonight Show” that A.I. will make sophisticated medical advice—the kind that has been limited by the availability of skilled practitioners—costless and commonplace over the next decade. Humans, he said, will no longer be needed “for most things.” (The New Yorker’s parent company, Condé Nast, has partnerships with several A.I. companies, including OpenAI.)

As it is, a recent poll found that about half of young people believe that individuals who do their own research can know as much as a doctor. Nearly forty per cent say they’ve followed advice seen on social media instead of a medical provider’s—even though around half of the top hundred trending mental-health videos on TikTok contain misleading or inaccurate information, according to an investigation by the Guardian. In the U.S., nearly four in ten parents identify as supporters of the MAHA movement. Meanwhile, according to a Gallup survey, the trust Americans have in doctors has fallen fourteen points since 2021, and now sits at its lowest level in decades. In 2025, a doctor at a clinic is just one purveyor of health care in an increasingly competitive market.

Historically, medicine’s power rested on a specific kind of cultural authority—the ability to determine not only what diseases exist, who has them, and what to do about it, but also what counts as evidence or truth. In “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” first published in 1983, the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr describes two pillars of professional authority: legitimacy and dependency. Legitimacy provides a basis for why people accept influence over their lives; dependency refers to the harm they’re likely to face if they don’t accept it. Starr argues that authority is, paradoxically, characterized by the power to compel or persuade—but it is undermined by the need to resort to either. If you have to talk people into believing that you’re right, it’s because they don’t think that you are.

Medicine is undergoing a kind of unbundling. Specialized services can now be accessed à la carte from many sources other than doctors—even if some are bad for our health. The upshot is that medicine can no longer take its cultural authority for granted. In today’s fractured and fractious health-care system, doctors must convince patients of the value of their expertise, and at times they must outcompete other kinds of providers. We may need to accept that we are no longer the high priests of health care. Perhaps, instead, it’s time to think of ourselves as what we have always been: healers.

The medical profession wasn’t always powerful. For decades after the nation’s founding, doctors had competition from homeopaths, herbalists, apothecaries, midwives, and religious healers—not to mention mothers. Some doctors worked second jobs. Benjamin Rush, a physician and a Founding Father, encouraged students at the country’s first medical school, the University of Pennsylvania, to cultivate a farm, so that they could eat even when business was bad. Otherwise, he told them, you might harbor “an impious wish for the prevalence of sickness in your neighbourhood.”

In the nineteenth century, doctors started to consolidate their authority by standardizing, and encouraging, medical education. Most states passed medical-licensing laws, although they were unevenly enforced. But during the populist era that followed the election of Andrew Jackson—one of Trump’s favorite Presidents—many states repealed licensing requirements altogether, amid a surge in suspicion of élites and expertise. Not until the twentieth century did medical schools, medical societies, and medical boards—three types of institutions that can buttress a profession—coalesce to give doctors a new level of influence.

Some of today’s challenges to medical authority, including political shifts and technological changes, began outside the medical field. But others seem like reactions to long-standing shortcomings. Tens of millions of Americans don’t have a primary-care doctor, and, in much of the country, wait times to see a physician reached new highs this year. More than half of U.S. counties don’t have a psychiatrist. Many people wish that their medical providers spent more time trying to understand them. Meanwhile, medical errors are estimated to harm hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.

The multibillion-dollar field of menopause care, which has historically been understudied and underfunded, hints at what’s happening to health care as a whole. There has been an explosion of investment: between 2019 and 2024, venture-capital funding for women’s health more than tripled, and women now have access to care that they previously didn’t have. But these funds are not necessarily flowing to medical professionals; in some cases, so-called menopause influencers are exploiting a “menopause Gold Rush.” “The slowly dawning realisation that these women might be slightly underserved . . . has unfortunately coincided with the high-water mark of aggressive capitalism,” the author Viv Groskop argued in the Guardian. The BBC journalist Kirsty Wark has warned that many women are promised relief from “debilitating symptoms if they buy specially branded supplements, teas, and even pyjamas.”

Worthwhile efforts to make medicine more convenient and accessible can sometimes lead to care that is diluted and extractive—partly because businesses can be untethered from the ethics that guide the medical profession. For many health-care startups, selling pills and products is tidier than the comprehensive forms of care offered at traditional medical practices; writing prescriptions is more scalable than building relationships. Last year, Cerebral, which called itself the fastest-growing mental-health company in history, agreed to pay millions of dollars in fines for overprescribing addictive A.D.H.D. medications. Last month, following a Wall Street Journal investigation, executives at the mental-health startup Done Global were found guilty of aggressively pushing Adderall. At the trial, one clinician testified that she was “just stamping” prescriptions without conducting follow-up patient visits. According to a former executive, the C.E.O. had encouraged employees to “bend laws” and told them, “Whoever is the first person to get arrested, I’ll buy you a Tesla.”

Technological fixes for medicine’s weaknesses carry similar possibilities and pitfalls. A.I. increasingly seems capable of solving complex medical cases; the United Kingdom has announced plans to roll out a “ChatGPT for the NHS,” intended to serve as a first point of contact for patients in need of primary care. In the U.S., the startup Doctronic offers free online visits with an A.I. clinician, with the option to see a human physician afterward—for a fee. Doctors have long been gatekeepers to medical technology, but now technology could serve as a gatekeeper to doctors.

Algorithmic health care comes with its own perils. Many people say that they’ve received incorrect medical advice from chatbots, and that it’s difficult for them to tell whether A.I.-generated health information is wrong. New research suggests that when chatbots are given false information they readily repeat and expand upon it. In a presentation to regulators, the head of the American Psychological Association warned that chatbots “masquerading” as therapists can be “antithetical” to responsible care. Several lawsuits allege that OpenAI’s models contributed to suicides among young people. (In one case, OpenAI denied the allegations in court filings.)

Earlier this year, a judge allowed a class-action lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare to move forward. According to the health-news site STAT, Medicare patients were forced out of rehabilitation facilities, or had to spend down their savings to remain in care, because an A.I. tool said they ought to have recovered by then. A subsidiary of the company reportedly set goals to closely align patients’ rehab stays with the A.I.’s output. (UnitedHealthcare denied the allegations, telling STAT that the tool wasn’t used to make coverage decisions.) One woman, Megan Bent, recounted the story of her father, who was in a rehab facility after surgery to remove a cancerous lesion from his brain. The A.I. tool said that he needed only a few weeks to recover; his neurosurgeon said three months. Bent won two appeals on behalf of her father, but, after a third, UnitedHealthcare said it would not cover his care. He went home with meningitis, returned to the hospital a few hours later, and died.

Starr, the Princeton sociologist, correctly predicted that corporatization would remake American health care, and that physicians would lose autonomy and authority. But what really surprised him, he told me recently, is the rise of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and what he called a “radical shift” in federal science policy. In 2025, according to the Times, the Trump Administration awarded grants to thousands fewer research projects than usual, which has affected virtually every aspect of medicine. This year, the Department of Health and Human Services purged thousands of employees and weakened government programs dedicated to tobacco control, environmental safety, injury prevention, and reproductive health. “This is part of an effort by one set of élites to use populist appeals to undermine another set of élites,” Starr told me. “I didn’t expect things to move this far, this fast.”

It’s not just money that’s being reallocated—it’s trust. When Trump tells pregnant women to “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol, citing a disputed link to autism, or when Kennedy remakes the country’s most important vaccine-advisory committee after suggesting that previous members were corrupt, they are signalling that doctors cannot be trusted as sources of truth. “The fact that MAHA is so parasitic on MAGA suggests that what’s happening in health is really a subset of a larger development,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Democracy and Truth,” told me. “All of these bulwarks that have helped us organize the transmission of knowledge are in crisis.” According to a recent KFF-Washington Post poll, many parents aren’t sure whether Kennedy’s claims about vaccines are true, and about half lack confidence that federal health agencies can insure the safety of vaccines. When displacing existing sources of authority, uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.

The medical profession of the twentieth century was a hegemon; today, it is a regional power. When a hegemon loses status, it can take a few paths. It can aim for restoration—bringing back the empire—which in this case would probably focus on gatekeeping. It can retreat, which might mean abdicating medicine’s broad public role, perhaps in favor of a narrow focus on earnings and technical skills. The last—and, in my view, the best—path is reinvention. Doctors can remake their profession by embracing the multi-polar medical landscape they now inhabit, and by acting as a kind of system stabilizer: working with other powers to help shape rules, norms, and relationships. A superpower may act as though it can stand alone, but middle powers know the value of diplomacy and coalition-building.

Reinventing the medical profession will require greater engagement with the world outside of hospitals and clinics. Many physicians are taking to social media; a cadre of “TikTok Docs” have amassed millions of followers with accessible and engaging videos. A growing number of doctors seem interested in leading health-care companies themselves or in running for office; in February, an advocacy organization set out to try to get a hundred physicians elected by 2030. Diplomacy also requires a willingness to stand in opposition to others. This year, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other medical organizations issued recommendations that conflicted with those of the federal government. A few weeks ago, a dozen former F.D.A. officials, all of them physicians, wrote that they were “deeply concerned” about “the latest in a series of troubling changes”: the agency planned to make the approval of new vaccines more difficult. Such a move, they wrote, “could diminish both the FDA’s strength and Americans’ health and safety.”

Medical school is a place not only for technical instruction but also for moral formation; becoming a doctor means adopting a way of thinking and also a way of behaving. “The thing that unites Hippocrates, and nineteenth-century physicians, and physicians today, is the thing that we’re trying to do: help people feel better,” Richard Baron, an internist and geriatrician who until recently led the American Board of Internal Medicine, told me. “How we do it changes all the time. What we do never does.” That is not to say that doctors never err—they do, sometimes egregiously—but a thriving profession will set norms, correct itself, and defend against unrestrained commercialization and exploitation. Even today, in a moment of pitched cynicism, the public seems to appreciate this. Americans of all backgrounds and politics still overwhelmingly trust their own doctors.

In recent years, as alternative sources of medical authority have proliferated, some doctors have grown frustrated with how their jobs have changed. Pediatricians spend more time persuading parents to get children vaccinated; oncologists counsel patients when full-body MRIs, which are not usually recommended by doctors, raise false alarms. Sometimes I’m irritated that I have to steer someone away from a trending procedure, or convince them that they need an antibiotic. Doctors tend to see these conversations as distractions—a detour from “real medicine.” But we ought to understand them as increasingly important and, indeed, central to our jobs. Today, the doctor’s perspective must replace the doctor’s orders.

When I met Jim, my first inclination was to lecture him about the risks of supplements, and I caught myself adopting an I-told-you-so tone that often characterizes health communication. As he relayed his story, though, I grew more curious than critical. In spite of myself, I started to employ the most basic skill in medicine, and, possibly, in human interaction: I tried to look at things from his perspective. If I were in his position, I told him, I might have done what he did. During the visit, I also noticed that his blood-sugar level was elevated, a potential sign of diabetes. Reassuringly, he agreed to see a doctor. He even asked if I’d care for him. (Alas, I only see hospitalized patients.) In a world of distributed authority, a doctor’s every conversation is a chance to help patients see the value of science and medicine in their lives.

This year, I’ve found myself considering an aphorism I first heard in medical school: cure sometimes, relieve often, comfort always. The phrase is sometimes attributed to Hippocrates, but probably comes from Edward Livingston Trudeau, a physician who founded a nineteenth-century tuberculosis sanitarium in upstate New York, when antibiotics did not exist. As medicine has grown more powerful, it has focussed increasingly on cures over comfort. But it doesn’t have to be this way. “Medicine isn’t getting its old status back,” Baron said. “And why should the average person care about whether doctors have a privileged position, anyway? What they care about is: Who is going to help me when I need help?”

Recently, I spoke with an older woman I’ll call Margaret, who for decades had struggled with alcohol and often thought about quitting. About a year ago, her primary-care doctor helped her get treatment. “She was the one who really called me out,” Margaret said. One evening, she started experiencing symptoms of alcohol withdrawal—anxiety, tremors, a racing heart rate—and messaged her doctor, who responded immediately. “She said, I’m here for you. I’ll meet you at the E.R. if you want to come in.” Margaret decided to stay home, and the doctor spent much of the evening checking in. “She’s the reason I got through that initial withdrawal,” Margaret told me. “She’s the reason I’m sober.” Margaret’s doctor knew what Margaret needed, showed up when it mattered, and shepherded her through the most difficult moments. That’s what people have always wanted from their doctors. It’s what they always will. ♦

Josh Safdie’s hectic new film “Marty Supreme,” set in 1952, mainly in New York, is, essentially, “Uncut Gems” but with a happy ending. That recklessly exuberant 2019 drama, which Safdie co-directed with his brother, Benny, stars Adam Sandler as a jewelry dealer in Manhattan and a compulsive gambler who takes thrilling risks to pay off his creditors and learns that the house always wins. With “Marty Supreme”—Safdie’s first feature directed without Benny since 2008—the happy ending follows logically from a happy beginning, so to speak. The film’s first scene features a tryst, in a back room of a shoe store, between the protagonist, a twenty-three-year-old salesman named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), and a young married woman named Rachel (Odessa A’zion).

But Marty’s greater happiness involves another secret, one that he’s scheming to spring on the world: that he, a Ping-Pong hustler who plays locally for modest stakes, is about to prove, in an international table-tennis tournament in London, that he’s the best in the world. For a scuffling guy from the Lower East Side, it’s a tall order; nonetheless, with his irrepressible energy and his wiles, he gets out of his low-rent neighborhood and into ever-wilder exploits that, in the story’s eight-month span, fling him about and leave him changed—perhaps even for the better.

Marty’s chutzpah is justified by history; the character is loosely based on the table-tennis hustler and champion Marty Reisman, who died in 2012, at the age of eighty-two. Like Marty, Reisman came from the Lower East Side and travelled overseas in 1952 for an international tournament. Other details, freely tweaked, mesh, too, but the main similarities are in temperament—a megawatt personality and a penchant for braggadocio.

Unlike Sandler’s gambler in “Uncut Gems,” Marty bets on no one but himself. It isn’t easy for Marty, who lives with his emotionally and financially dependent mother (Fran Drescher), to fund the trip to London: it takes ruses and threats and some outmaneuvering of his boss, his doting but tough uncle Murray (the writer Larry Sloman). So, once Marty gets there, he has to make the most of it. He finds the competition stiffer than he expected—especially from a Japanese player (the real-life table-tennis star Koto Kawaguchi), who uses a new kind of paddle and grip. But what matters even more than winning any one match is to get into the spotlight and into the higher echelons of society, since, to launch an international career, Marty needs rich backers—and, in any case, he craves fame and the trappings of success. Bulldozing his way into a suite at the Ritz, Marty focusses his impudent charm on a glamorous former movie star, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), and also ingratiates himself with her husband, a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell (the entrepreneur, politician, and “Shark Tank” judge Kevin O’Leary) with an eye for publicity and, as he says, a nose for bullshit.

While there, Marty also partners with a Hungarian former champion, who survived Auschwitz (Géza Röhrig, who played an Auschwitz inmate in “Son of Saul”), in a table-tennis stunt duo. His relationship with Rachel, who works at a pet shop and has a lumpish husband, Ira (Emory Cohen), tightens—or, rather, she tightens it, with a ruse of her own. Then Marty faces a quandary, akin to the money emergency that screeches like a siren through “Uncut Gems”: hit with a fine by the table-tennis commissioner (the writer Pico Iyer) for boorish behavior in London, and left with little time to pay it off in order to enter a tournament in Tokyo, he starts Ping-Pong hustling again, in the company of a cabdriver friend named Wally (the rapper Tyler, the Creator). The result is a whirlwind of chaos that involves such out-of-control elements as a gangster (the filmmaker Abel Ferrara), a dog, a car crash, a break-in, a shoot-out, a fire, a flood, another affair, and a display of public defiance so brazen that it risks becoming an international incident.

Safdie delivers this bustling, hyperkinetic story with a hyperspeed aesthetic: whizzing and whipping camerawork (overseen by the cinematographer, Darius Khondji) that presses very close to the actors and exaggerates their frenzied motion, clattering high-velocity dialogue that seems pounded onto the screen with hammer and die, characters expressing themselves with impulsive gestures, editing that slashes away any moments of repose, a script that’s filled with hairpin reversals of fortune. With its breathless pace, “Marty Supreme” favors a style of acting that’s far less dependent on technique to construct scenes than on personality and presence to create moments—which explains the film’s zesty mix of professional actors with notables from other fields of endeavor. It’s a practice that the Safdies relied on in their previous features, but never as extensively or as effectively. The drama built into the casting of “Marty Supreme” reaches its apex when, playing the tycoon Rockwell, whom Marty beseeches at a crucial time of need, O’Leary utters the word “power” with hardened authority.

Nonetheless, “Marty Supreme” is Chalamet’s show, and he dominates it, incarnating Marty’s callow enthusiasm while also lending it an edge. Marty is a born performer; the hustle itself is a performance that depends on an elaborate pretense of playing badly, which he persuasively amplifies with a show of whiny kvetching. His shameless publicity-seeking involves wheedling, bragging, blustering, or just plain lying with a straight face that could put professional actors to shame—and indeed does, when he pursues Kay (who’s attempting a comeback) into a rehearsal and upstages her co-star. Chalamet embodies Marty’s arrant showmanship with an evident joy in performance, exactly as Marty himself schemes not only shamelessly but jubilantly. And his energy is contagious—A’zion and Paltrow tussle with him at the same level of electrifying intensity.

Though “Marty Supreme” is Safdie’s sixth fiction feature, it’s only the second that he has directed solo. (The first, “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” from 2008, which he completed at the age of twenty-three, also features a Ping-Pong hustle of sorts.) He co-directed the four in between—“Daddy Longlegs,” “Heaven Knows What,” “Good Time,” and “Uncut Gems”—with Benny, whose first solo feature, “The Smashing Machine,” an appealing but mild bio-pic of the mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr, was released earlier this year. Judging from the brothers’ new solo features, it’s Benny who has been the voice of logic in their collaborations, Josh the engine of fury. Benny’s absence is detectable in a few omissions, especially in scenes of mayhem and their aftermath which never get the attention of the police. Also, with his emphasis on Marty’s audacious escapades, Safdie never gets into Marty’s head—or into his body. The movie offers little in the way of athletic subjectivity, of his feel for the game or his competitive strategies.

Still, Josh appears to have come out ahead in their separation, because, in “Marty Supreme,” he remained in partnership with Ronald Bronstein, who is, in effect, the third Safdie brother—a co-writer and co-editor of all four of the brothers’ joint movies, and the star of their quasi-autobiographical “Daddy Longlegs,” playing a version of the brothers’ father.

Bronstein is one of the hidden heroes of the modern cinema. He has directed only one feature to date, “Frownland,” which premièred in 2007; it’s the story of a troubled young Brooklynite whose soul is shredded by the cruelty and coldness he endures at work, at home, and in love, and its hallucinatory turbulence opened vistas for a new generation of harsh, high-strung, and uninhibitedly inventive independent movies, such as those of the Safdies, Alex Ross Perry (whose “Pavements” was a highlight of this year), Amy Seimetz (“Sun Don’t Shine”), and his wife, Mary Bronstein (whose 2008 feature “Yeast” is a high point of Greta Gerwig’s acting career and whose new one, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” is among the most acclaimed movies of 2025). The Bronstein cinematic DNA even extends to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” in which a key role is played by Paul Grimstad, a musician and professor with only one prior acting credit—for a major role in “Frownland.” (He also has a bit part in “Marty Supreme.”)

Though “Marty Supreme” is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize—hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically—the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality. I’m not, of course, suggesting that Safdie or Bronstein has ever done anything Marty-like—lied, cheated, threatened, insulted, seduced, betrayed, stolen, clobbered, been clobbered, or endangered others in pursuit of their art—but that, in imagining Marty, they’ve successfully extrapolated from the mind-bending extremes of energy and will that the movie life demands. Safdie, like Marty, bet on himself, starting with D.I.Y. filmmaking, and advancing through a decade-plus of critically acclaimed movies on the industry’s periphery. Now, with “Marty Supreme,” he’s in reach of the brass ring, even as he self-deprecatingly admits what it feels like to have fought his way there. ♦