Review: Caught Stealing

Darren Aronofsky has never been an easy filmmaker to pin down, but Caught Stealing marks the first time his unpredictability feels more like drift than daring. On the surface, this shaggy New York crime caper doesn’t even look like an Aronofsky movie at all. From its trailers, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a Guy Ritchie knockoff: cruel laughs, random violence, and a supporting player with a mohawk so tall it could be seen from Queens. But if this is Aronofsky’s lightest, least consequential film, it still bears traces of his taste for brutality, and it boasts one performance strong enough to keep the whole rickety contraption from collapsing.

The year is 1998, and the film makes sure you know it. Smash Mouth’s “Walking on the Sun” blares from the soundtrack, Jerry Springer flickers on TV sets, and baseball is still sacred enough that Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) nurses his broken career like a permanent hangover. Hank’s a bartender in a Lower East Side dive where everybody knows his name, living in a run-down but comfortable apartment, dating a whip-smart paramedic, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), and greeting each morning with a cold beer. It’s not glamorous, but it’s a life he’s made peace with, until his neighbor Russ (Matt Smith, all cockney sneer and Camden-punk cosplay) dumps his cat Bud in Hank’s lap and jets off to London.

Russ leaves more than a cat behind. Soon enough, Hank’s door is kicked in by competing factions of Russian mobsters, Hasidic Jewish gangsters, and a Puerto Rican enforcer named Colorado (played ridiculously by Bad Bunny). Everyone’s after $4 million in missing cash, and they all think Hank knows where it is. Toss in a dogged detective (a miscast Regina King), Hank’s weary boss (Griffin Dunne, nodding back to After Hours), and the occasional soup-slurping mitzvah scene, and the movie threatens to become a screwball parade of New York archetypes.

But Aronofsky isn’t Scorsese, and he isn’t Ritchie, either. He directs the material at a cold, ominous crawl, smothering the pulp with long zooms and austere compositions courtesy of Matthew Libatique. What should feel like anarchic chaos instead feels tonally inbalanced, ofting shifting from sappy humor to harrowing violence. The production design sweats nostalgia, the Unisphere, Coney Island, thrift-store grime, but the city never comes alive.

What does come alive, thankfully, is Butler. Since Elvis, he’s chosen roles that emphasize range, and here he finds the bruised humanity in a man who just wants to be left alone with his cat and his regrets. This is the most human Butler has been on screen. Hank takes a ludicrous number of beatings over two hours, but Butler wears the blood and broken bones with a sense of wounded dignity. He’s the kind of actor who can make you believe this hapless bartender has a soul worth saving, even if the movie can’t be bothered to prove it. Kravitz, sadly, isn’t given much to do beyond reminding us Hank has someone worth fighting for, but she still brings enough to the table here.

The rest of the cast is trapped in caricature, some more fun than others. Smith struts and sneers like he’s auditioning for a Lock, Stock revival. It is fun if tonally misaligned. Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, nearly unrecognizable as Hasidic brothers, oscillate between menace and parody. Aronofsky seems content to let his actors sketch in broad strokes, but without the energy or wit to sell it, the film lurches between brutality and limp comedy.

And yet, for all its misfires, Caught Stealing is worth seeing. The retro soundtrack has bite (though, cheekily, Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” is absent—too on the nose, perhaps?), and there’s enough momentum in Huston’s script to keep things from collapsing completely. Most importantly, there’s Bud the cat (played by Tonic), He slinks through scenes with more poise and purpose than most of the human ensemble, giving Krypto the Superdog some genuine competition in the pet-performance sweepstakes. Butler is the real reason to see that film.

In the end, Caught Stealing isn’t the disaster its premise suggests, nor is it a hidden gem. It’s a Darren Aronofsky movie that doesn’t quite know how to be one: too brutal to be breezy, too stiff to be funny, and too shallow to be profound. Butler makes it consistently watchable, Bud makes it memorable, but for a director once known for swinging for the fences, this feels like a bunt. The movie is tonally at odds with itself. Thankfully the soulful, moving performance by Butler is front and center.

3.5/5