Caught Stealing is a bag-of-money movie about an innocent man suddenly thrust into a terrifying underworld, but don’t let the broad outline fool you into thinking Darren Aronofsky has given into commercial impulses. There’s still not an open wound or an overflowing toilet he won’t stare at, and the rogues gallery of this violent screwball tragedy includes — shades of Pi, the director’s breakthrough from 1998, when this film is set — a pair of deadly Brighton Beach mobsters who are also very strict about observing Shabbos.
Thrown into this chaos is bartender Hank (Austin Butler), who seems like an all-American boy next door, down to his obsessive love of baseball, specifically the San Francisco Giants. But Hank has a dark side, stemming from a tragedy years before that radically changed the trajectory of his life. Still, he’s in love with paramedic Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), who represents the possibility of a better future.
Hank’s life gets messy when his punk next-door neighbor Russ (Matt Smith, complete with mohawk) suddenly goes to London to visit his sick father, leaving Hank in charge of his cat Bud (played by Tonic — a feline star is born). Russ apparently has something that a lot of bad people want, and into Hank’s orbit suddenly arrives a pair of Russian henchmen (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov), the trigger-happy Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), and the aforementioned Orthodox mobsters (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber). Throw in no-nonsense police detective Elise Roman (Regina King), and Hank suddenly finds himself in a world of hurt.
Working from Charlie Huston’s adaptation of their own novel, Aronofsky and editors Justin Allison and Andrew Weisblum keep the pace popping and the audience guessing: something hilarious or something horrifying, or maybe even a combination of the two, happens around nearly every corner. And even though Hank spends most of the movie dashing frantically from place to place as people try to kill him — not for nothing does Griffin Dunne pop up as a character named Paul, as it was in After Hours — the protagonist finds time to experience growth along the way, with the prospect of possible impending death forcing him to face down the ghosts and failings of his own past.
It’s a meaty character arc for a very physical role, and Butler is perfectly cast, demonstrating that his breakthrough role in Elvis was no fluke, as he more than holds his own among this extraordinary ensemble (which also includes Carol Kane, Action Bronson, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). Aronofsky’s preferred cinematographer Matthew Libatique captures a period, pre-dot-com-boom New York City with lived-in grit, saving the showy camerawork for a breathtaking action set piece at the old World’s Fair Unisphere in Queens. (There are plenty of other 1998 signifiers sprinkled throughout, from Smash Mouth and Meredith Brooks on the jukebox to Kim’s Video as an up-and-running storefront operation.)
In an era when studio product feels focus-group–approved and run through a let’s-not-upset-anyone machine, Aronofsky’s knockabout character study comes off as a bold outlier; the right audience will find it this fall, assuming it can survive the curse of being dumped by Sony on Labor Day weekend. For most crime capers, shooting is funny but killing isn’t; the always-divisive Aronofsky obliterates the line between comedy and realism, and the result is a farce that’s both literally and figuratively explosive.
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Screenwriters: Charlie Huston, based on their book
Cast: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Griffin Dunne, Carol Kane
Producers: Jeremy Dawson, Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Darren Aronofsky
Executive producers: Ann Ruark, Charlie Huston, Tarak Ben Ammar, Mohannad Malas
Cinematographer: Matthew Libatique
Production design: Mark Friedberg
Editing: Andrew Weisblum
Music: Rob Simonsen
Sound design: Craig Henighan, re-recording mixer, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Columbia Pictures, Eagle Pictures, Protozoa Productions
In English
107 minutes
