Darren Aronofsky’s scrappy crime movie feels a little on the nose, but is injected with plenty of life by its cast of loveable rogues
Deliberately retro, grimy and rollicking, Caught Stealing is a crime caper film with notes of Martin Scorsese and Guy Ritchie. Nineties New York City provides the backdrop for its motley ensemble of rogues: an ex baseball player, an erstwhile punk and some vengeful gangsters, who experience a series of misunderstandings that lead to nothing but trouble. In other words, with a dash of Steven Soderbergh and a dash of 80s yuppie nightmare, it’s the kind of film you’ve seen before. But never mind: sometimes there’s comfort in the familiar, and Hollywood isn’t exactly churning out great, gritty little crime movies on a regular basis, so it’s alright by me.
Director Darren Aronofsky – with his penchant for dark psychological thrillers – is the divisive filmmaker behind Black Swan, Mother!, and the controversial 2022 film The Whale; here, he tries to inject a rare dose of levity into proceedings. Caught Stealing leans heavily on the sparky chemistry between its leads – the willowy, pouty-faced movie star on the make Austin Butler, late of Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 Elvis biopic – and his laconic East Village girlfriend, Yvonne, played by the equally gorgeous Zoë Kravitz.
Butler is Hank, who finds himself aimless after a knee injury, sustained in a drink-driving accident, has ended his baseball career. Now without his usual purpose, he is living in a scruffy East Village flat while tending bar; he is unwittingly drawn into a zany plot involving a stash of stolen money after agreeing to do some kindly cat-sitting for the neighbourhood punk, Russ.
Unfortunately, Russ (a Mohican-donning Matt Smith, looking a bit different from his incarnation as Doctor Who) can’t help but leave a trail of devastation in his wake, and Hank is dragged further into the undertow of the Big Apple’s criminal life. He zips between crooked cops, Russian mobsters and, in an attempt to exonerate himself, the Hasidic Jewish community, repetitively attracting Looney-Tunes punches to the face as he goes. As he continually tries to prove his innocence, his life falls further apart – making him look all the more guilty to the authorities, as well as to the hitmen who want to kill him.
Aronofsky has a clear feel for the endless variety and vivacity of city life, with all the oddball characters you can imagine. The ensemble cast features the likes of the prodigiously talented Regina King as a detective carefully eyeballing her quarry, as well as Griffin Dunne – the former star of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, in a clear nod to that 80s role – and even Bad Bunny (a surprisingly good actor for a pop superstar).
Caught Stealing’s zany mix of comedy and drama tests your patience at times – though its crackerjack sexual tension is hard to argue with, and Austin Butler is a genuine, stop-and-take-notice screen presence. His charisma may well hold the whole inchoate package together, as he stammers and shrugs his way through the electric energy of the city.
And while Aronofsky is hardly reinventing the crime genre or digging deep to interrogate important matters, he is clearly having a wonderful time plunging Butler into this scrappy little movie full of nocturnal crazies and ne’er-do-wells.
