Darren Aronofsky needed a hit after his previous lugubrious films The Whale, Mother!, and Noah. So Caught Stealing is his new box office wager. It intensifies Aronofsky’s usual interest in mental and physical anguish. This time, the suffering protagonist is Henry Thompson (Austin Butler), an alcoholic bartender on New York’s grungy Lower East Side. It’s 1998, before today’s social anxieties, but Henry gets a foretaste in this mistaken-identity drama: While caring for a friend’s cat, he’s threatened by drug dealers (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber) and a corrupt cop (Regina King). The animal’s feral instincts symbolize how Henry will deal with physical violence and his own insecurities and anger.

Henry is an all-American WASP, once a high school baseball prodigy who, following a drunken car accident that smashed his legs and ended his career chances, relocates from California to New York’s melting piss-pot. The drug drama hurls Henry through the city’s corruption — immigrants, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Russians, and Hasidim combat each other in a greedy, distorted competition for survival. His sexy biracial girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) warns him, “If you don’t confront what you’re afraid of then it owns you.”

Each gruesome episode of Henry getting beaten, losing a kidney, and suffering an alcoholic relapse — all while keeping up baseball pleasantries on the phone with his mother on the West Coast — contributes to Caught Stealing resembling a sordid combination of Sean Baker’s Anora and Scorsese’s After Hours.

Aronofsky takes on generic commercialism. The story (from a novel by screenwriter Charlie Huston) elaborates on his obsession with private psychological and physical struggle. It’s a low-pressure thriller. Aronofsky’s intellectual pretenses prevent him from making a pell-mell action movie; he simply goes through the motions. Beneath the surface excitation is a brainy struggle with non-commercial ethnic identity that harkens back to his 1998 debut film Pi.

There’s less folderol about religion and mysticism here, but the obsessive coincidences and violence are central to his means. Instead of Pi’s fascination with Gematria or the correspondence of the Hebrew alphabet to numbers, Aronofsky turns his ethnic preoccupation into a wild chase. He’s a brainy half-brother to the Safdies. More expressly Jewish than Kubrick, Aronofsky’s calculations resemble the identity crises formerly associated with the great mid-century novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, and Henry Roth.

Austin Butler is well cast as the slim, athletic, slightly dull yet dreamy hitter — a believable modern variation on Robert Redford in The Natural. But WASP Henry confuses Aronofsky’s personal issues, as does the casting of other non-white characters. Aronofsky’s not focused on social justice like ultra liberal Sean Baker. Kravitz and King don’t really represent black struggle; they’re just Aronofsky’s nods to other ethnic anxieties that he doesn’t fully understand. (King’s stereotype obstreperous black-girl cop effs with him, then jokes, “You never know what might pop off!”) Despite the title Caught Stealing, the film is short on baseball lore, skeptical about what used to be considered All-Americanness.

But Henry’s also another of Aronofsky’s Job figures. The title reference to Henry’s desperate pragmatism (claiming the filthy lucre as “half of everything I own”) merely reveals Aronofsky’s misunderstanding of morality. Instead, there’s a semi-entertaining subplot of frighteningly dangerous Jewish characters, referred to as “Hebrews.” The D’Onofrio-Schreiber treacherous comic duo — the Drucker brothers — complain to Henry, “We’re in enough trouble with Hashem!” It’s the funniest ethnic jape since the Coen Brothers made A Serious Man.

Because Aronofsky’s basically humorless, the Drucker lines that mean the most are their repeated lamentation, “Sad world. Broken world.” It recalls the Bernard Malamud short story “The Mourners” that asks, “How in so short a life could man do so much wrong? . . . He groaned at the broken picture of his self.” The Drucker brothers ask Henry, “A clear conscience is what you want?” using Yiddish theater inflections. (An unrecognizable Carol Kane plays their suspicious Bubbe.)

Critic Irving Howe on Malamud’s “blend of harsh realism and compassionate insight” also describes the twisted empathy in Aronofsky’s weird filmography from Pi and Requiem for a Dream to now. Henry’s ultimate retreat to exotic Tulum is an escape from the millennial anxieties to come. Caught Stealing is a Bernard Malamud story gone berserk.