In some ways, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing reminds you of his first feature film π. It’s set in 1998, when π was released, it takes place in the same gritty Lower New York milieu, and it’s about one terrified guy fleeing through the city from some badass Orthodox Jews. Yet this lowbrow thriller doesn’t have the horror-movie trappings of π or Aronofsky’s other best work. It compensates for that with some modest charms.
Austin Butler portrays Hank Thompson, a former high-school baseball phenom until he wrecked his knee and killed his teammate (D’Pharoah Woon-a-Tai) in the same drunk-driving accident. Now he’s a bartender and the biggest San Francisco Giants fan in New York City, and he reluctantly steps up when his British punk-rocker next-door neighbor Russell (Matt Smith) asks him to take care of his cat during a family emergency. Hank is going into Russell’s apartment for some cat food when two Ukrainian thugs (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) demand that he produce Russell, and when Hank tries to explain that Russell has returned to England, they beat him so badly that he loses a kidney. He can never drink alcohol again, which devastates him, but not as much as finding his EMT girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz) murdered in her apartment.
Adapted from Charlie Huston’s novel, this is yet another crime thriller where characters’ stupidity and machismo result in a much higher body count than there should be. A random bar patron (Action Bronson) starts throwing punches at the Ukrainians’ Puerto Rican boss (Benito Martínez Ocasio a.k.a. Bad Bunny), and when he gets shot, the old bar owner who employs Hank (Griffin Dunne) decides to shoot it out with the Ukrainians on principle. Two Hasidic brothers (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber) chase Hank through the streets, and when a bike messenger impedes them, they punch the man in the throat repeatedly and leave him for dead. They make fascinating villains, who refuse to drive on the Sabbath and introduce Hank to their grandmother (Carol Kane) but then open fire on a crowd waiting outside a Russian restaurant so they can kill the mobster and bodyguards inside.
All this is neatly done, but Caught Stealing is still way less substantive than Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest and David Mackenzie’s Relay, both New York-set crime thrillers that are playing in the multiplexes. In fact, the only thing keeping this film from forgettability is Butler’s performance as a drunk who hasn’t yet faced the defining trauma of his life, and who breaks down in a phone conversation with his mother in California (an uncredited Laura Dern): “I killed Dale! I killed him, and I didn’t think about him at all! All I could think about was how I fucked up my knee and couldn’t play anymore!” He holds the center amid a powerful cast, which includes Regina King as a New York cop. You know, Huston has written a series of novels about Hank. If Butler stayed on to play him in another film adaptation, I wouldn’t mind.
Caught Stealing
Starring Austin Butler and Regina King. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Written by Charlie Huston, based on his own novel. Rated R.
