Caught Stealing (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) makes Darren Aronofsky look almost like a regular-ass director. The filmmaker behind classic brainmelters mother!, Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan follows up his 2022 sourpuss drama The Whale with a crime-comedy based on a Charlie Huston novel and starring Austin Butler (Dune: Part 2, Elvis) as a put-upon go-nowhere who gets caught up in the New York City crime underworld. Audiences mostly shrugged at it – the internet-lust thrust toward Butler has yet to yield significant box office returns – but Aronofskyites should consider it a curiosity: Can this auteur put a little art into what is by all accounts a film aimed at mainstream audiences?
The Gist: It’s 1998. The Lower East Side. “4 IN THE MORNING,” a subtitle blares. Hank boots lingering boozers out of the bar, shakes his head in the general direction of the score of the San Francisco Giants game (they lost), sweeps up and goes home. He’s joined by Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz), a paramedic who might or might not be his girlfriend, but boy, do they look sexy together, especially when they’re just in their undies. By early afternoon, they’re awake and Yvonne heads home and Hank glugs down his breakfast MGD. Yeah. Not good. He still has nightmares about That Fateful Day when he was roaring down the road in his IROC-Z, listening to the Scorpions (“Rock You Like a Hurricane,” of course) with a buddy and sipping a few small beers, and his major league prospects went straight down the shitter. He still holds on to that dream, sort of. He calls his mother back home in San Fran every day, and ends each and every call with a “Go Giants.”
Hank’s nextdoor neighbor is Russ (Matt Smith), a British leather-and-studs punker who’s more mohawk than man. Russ needs to visit his ailing father in London, and asks-without-really-asking Hank to take care of his cat while he’s gone. The cat’s a biter, but is cute as hell, so prepare yourself for the most ridiculous phrase I’ve written this year: Aronofsky-directed adorbs-cat reaction shots. Hank’s futzing with the lock on Russ’ door when two bald-headed goons who may or may not be Ukrainian and may or may not be nihilists stomp into the scene and demand to know where Russ is. Instead of just answering a question posed by a pair of intimidating hooligans directly, Hank plays coy and gets his ass beat all the way to Long Island for it. He awakens in the hospital minus one kidney, but with Yvonne’s sympathy, so I guess it could be worse.
Yvonne takes Hank home, and it seems like he should be in more pain than he is considering down a significant organ. More painful is the doctor’s orders: “No alcohol, forever,” Yvonne reads off the post-op paperwork. She opens the fridge and it’s full of beer and she opens the freezer and it’s full of booze and she opens the cabinet and that’s also full of booze and in a later scene there’s yet another cabinet with some bottles in it. Methinks Hank is an alcoholic. He might have more immediate problems, though, because the hooligans still lurk, as do a Puerto Rican heavy (Benito Martinez Ocasio, a.k.a. Bad Bunny), and two Hasidic Jewish men described as “scary monsters” (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber). Hank consults with Detective Roman (Regina King), who informs him he’s deep in the shit now, and he only gets deeper when he scoops the shit in the cat box and finds a li’l fake log hiding a key that surely opens the door to whatever all these unseemly types want so badly. If you’re getting the feeling that this is one of those movies where things get worse before they get better, you’d be right on the money.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Butler was similarly miscast in the similarly middling The Bikeriders. The bad guys seem lifted directly from the Coen Bros.’ central casting (especially The Big Lebowski). And speaking of, it’s a bit strange to see Aronofsky take a flying stab at a genre that the Coens, Guy Ritchie and even Quentin Tarantino are more adept at; Aronofsky’s one of their peers, and he curiously seems to be taking cues from them like they’re an influence.
Performance Worth Watching: In an all-too-brief role, Kravitz lends the film some necessary feminine energy (and it likely needs more of it); King seems to be the only cast member capable of playing in key and in time with Aronofsky’s tonal blend of comedy and drama.
Memorable Dialogue: “Never know what’ll pop loose!” – Roman
Sex and Skin: Like I said, Butler and Kravitz look great in their underwear – and out of it, a little bit, anyway.
Our Take: Aronofsky struggles to corral the tone of Caught Stealing, which is an ungainly melange of cartoonish caricature and pithy tragedy. The film’s glib treatment of death and PTSD-derived addiction weirdly elides dark comedy, and clashes with Butler’s performance – the sad-eyed depth of his expressions carry significantly more dramatic intensity than the bloody juicy pulp the rest of the movie dishes out. You watch Butler inhabit this character and wait for him to acknowledge his emotional hardship in a meaningful way, but the film is more interested in barreling ahead to the next plot development or violent incident.
Part of this discrepancy derives from Hank’s underwritten character. We’re not sure if the events of the film are an opportunity for him to process his trauma or to come into his own as a new man, one who dwells on the fringe, watches out for number one and sticks up for himself. The arc of the character fails to be convincing; if it were a comic book, we’d sense that numerous panels are missing, and wonder if all the dynamic, terrifically rendered action exists to distract us from the holes in the fabric of Hank’s character.
And yet, Aronofsky is forever a hell of a director. He gives us thoughtfully considered visuals, a tangible sense of setting and the general rigors of form we might not normally get in a mid-budget star-drive crime-comedy like this. There’s significant craft in both the action sequences and the dramatic set pieces, and the film is shot through with a raucous, rock ‘n’ roll spirit. But it’s emotionally empty, its game attempts at comedy clashing with, say, a shot of a dead body that should rip our hearts out. We’re left relating more to the cat – who, again, is the subject of multiple crowdpleasing reaction shots, and ends up getting more screen time than Kravitz – than the human characters. He observes, wide-eyed, without quite comprehending what he sees.
Our Call: Meow. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.