As odd as the prospect of a traditional crime caper from the chronically divisive filmmaker Darren Aronofsky might seem (and I say this as a die-hard fan of Mother!), Caught Stealing isn’t all that at odds with the likes of Black Swan (2010), The Wrestler (2008), and Requiem for a Dream (2000). Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.
On paper, it’s Aronofsky’s take on Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), a shaggy-dog New York story undercut with an anxious, restless feel for the city. Its star, Griffin Dunne, even has a small role as a bar manager. But what you would assume would be a warm, lively film is shot at a deathly, ominous crawl – heavy on the slow zooms and austere in its framing, courtesy of cinematographer Matthew Libatique.
And that makes for a rather cold, unwelcoming experience. There’s none of the ghoulishness of Aronofsky’s The Whale (2022), which treated the fat body as nothing more than a metaphorical playground, but there is that speckling of grime and almost childlike innocence to its protagonist. Set in 1998, and adapted by Charlie Huston from his own novel, it presents us with a humble bartender named Henry “Hank” Thompson (Austin Butler), who’s described by his own situationship Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) as someone who likes dogs, likes baseball, loves his mother, and calls her when he can.
But when his punk neighbour, Russ (Matt Smith), dumps his cat Bud on him and flees back to England, Hank suddenly finds himself at what seems to be the epicentre of the criminal underworld, targeted by the Puerto Rican Colorado (Benito A Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), the Russian mobsters Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov), and the Hasidic Jewish brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio). Following behind is police detective Elise Roman (Regina King). There’s around $4m in cash stashed away somewhere. That’s a big enough number that no one’s afraid to spill a little blood in its pursuit.
Everyone here is a New York archetype, and the film ticks off so many local sights it starts to feel like we’ve been involuntarily signed up to an open-top bus tour (from Queens’s Unisphere monument to Coney Island!). But it’s too hasty a sketch of the place, content to limit the punchline to the idea that two stone-cold gangsters would take time out of their day to visit their bubbe (played by Carol Kane) and respect the rules of Shabbat. Yvonne exists only to serve the narrative, though she’s tossed a gun-shaped lighter to prove she’s a city girl.
It’s thin material for such an impressive cast to be working with, and even Butler, who’s made all the right choices post-Elvis when it comes to compelling and varied work, can’t really imagine Hank beyond the mould of tender-hearted victim. He takes all the beatings – and there are a lot of them, which is where Aronofsky’s taste for the brutal slips in – with a noble tear in his eye, haunted as he is by a traumatic accident in his youth that put an end to his baseball career.
If there is an MVP, it’s Bud, played by a cat called Tonic – a creature of such canny intelligence that Aronofsky should consider making his next film about the Black Swan-esque tortures of being a feline thespian. He might have another Oscar-winning performance on his hands there.
Dir: Darren Aronofsky. Starring: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, Carol Kane. Cert 15, 107 minutes
‘Caught Stealing’ is in cinemas from 28 August
