Josh Safdie’s second solo feature stars the divisively alluring Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a Jewish-American pro table tennis player with a penchant for reckless scheming. Set in 1952, it covers the nine months between the conception and birth of Marty’s child. The film is bookended by an animation sequence of the fertilization occurring inside Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), and the birth of the child after Marty returns from the championship games in Japan. A perfectly, even cleanly chaotic picture of one selfish man’s ascension to the role of fatherhood. Complete with a devastating Chalamet crying shot.

For a film that flaunts unconventionality as a resource, public sex, indiscriminate petty theft, striking adulterous love scenes, Marty Supreme is unusually conservative. And I mean conservative not politically but structurally— in its narrative beats, in its characterizations. The Smashing Machine, the other Safdie fictionalized biopic of the year had this similar sheen of respectability where taboo is redressed with a clear eyed moral resolution. Robert Bronstein, who co-wrote and co-edited the Marty Supreme, is married to If I Had Legs I’d Kick You director Mary Bronstein, which incidentally also featured a famous rapper in a sidekick role. In If I Had Legs, Linda (Rose Byrne) has a husband who exists almost exclusively as an unsympathetic bordering on antagonistic voice on the phone as she alone copes with their child’s illness. The narrative culminates in a blindly horrifying scene where Linda pulls a feeding tube out of her daughter. Motherhood as a black hole of fear and fatherhood as a moral call to action. That’s amore!

Beyond its gratuitous but felicitous cast, Marty Supreme has its obvious charms. My favorite scene was the lunch where Holocaust survivor Bela Kletzki (Geza Rohrig) tells Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) a homoerotic story about bringing honey back to the other prisoners at the camp, a flashback so visually arresting it felt like the only permanent image of the film. There are a number of wonderfully delivered quips both hilarious and bitterly cutting; Marty asking Milton why he wants to sell pens to the people that killed his son comes to mind. A ready amount of brilliant needle drops distributed throughout an impeccably paced runtime. The blocking in the scene where Marty discovers that Rachel is pregnant, and she’s framed literally behind bars as he looks at her is lovely. There is something satisfying about watching someone look sweaty and desperate, Chalamet knows desperation just as well as he knows arrogance.

And yet the signifiers feel empty; Marty’s drive is essentially nationalistic under the very faint guise of rugged melting pot individualism and cultural assimilation. The idea of “the American” as a geo-political underdog is not only ahistorical, it is frankly a little condescending. One of the central tenets of Americanism is exceptionalism and the idea that it has to be exerted onto others, as if it were contagious. But really, ruthless extraction is the ubiquitous core of Americanism, petty theft at increasingly larger scales. The entire film hinges on the belief that there is a way to sell out and still win. That your actions can always be justified as long as you can categorize your life into a series of lessons. Life should be more physical than constant mythmaking.

Safdie’s micro-budget cinema stretched out over an international historical drama quickly begins to appear thin. And perhaps all that a $70 million budget really does to a DIY filmmaker is buy respectability. In this sense, the question is not which Safdie brother has the sauce but which one will better be able to hide the veneer that increased capital paints onto a film’s affect? The answer of course is that Josh deciphered the zeitgeist a little clearer. Safdie’s eye and Darius Khondji’s camera are indisputable, however there is something bittersweet about that wonderful excess of style in service of something as uninspired as reproductive futurism.

Americans have in a lot of ways institutionalized a fiction of the redemptive figure of the Child. Your baby will not save you! Marty’s arc is less of an unearned redemption and more of redundant rationalization. Redundancy in general is the dominating mode of Marty Supreme. The entire endeavour’s largeness is unrelenting, even more so than the usual Oscar bait actor vehicle, because Safdie insists on shoving it into an expressively diminutive style. This film is ultimately if Raging Bull (1980) was Saving Mr. Banks (2013) . Which is fine I guess but kind of a weird thing to decide to make!

Speaking of Scorsese; what a lot of the filmmakers committed to emulating him seem to misunderstand is his framing of masculinity as a balance of self-indulgence and cowardice. His films manage to delineate the circumstances of the world that arbitrarily enables and punishes men but also considers their own inability to make decisions in anyone else’s best interest. There is a deliberate and reactionary defensiveness, whatever the marker of greatness being chased, that precludes even their own physical well being. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s the death drive. The stakes almost menacingly seem higher for everyone else in the film but its titular character. Wally gets slurred at, Mishkin gets murdered, Moses the dog gets injured and then kidnapped by a crazy farmer, Rachel gets shot while pregnant. Marty loses out on a free diamond necklace because he just had to give head in the park and gets spanked by a rich man.

Marty Supreme goes to great lengths to posit a loser with game as the sacred hope of American determinism post WW2, in an on the nose show off between two countries that both have extraneous histories of imperialism. And it ultimately feels a little early for either Chalamet or Safdie to be so intent on moralizing their ambition. A spectacle firing on all cylinders but pointing at nothing in particular.