Caught Stealing

The Grime and the Glory of Surviving the Nineties

I spent the first twenty minutes of Darren Aronofsky’s *Caught Stealing* waiting for the other shoe to drop. You cannot really blame me. If you have survived the psychological meat grinders of *Requiem for a Dream* or *Mother!*, you go into an Aronofsky picture bracing for impact. You expect characters to be punished for their hubris in increasingly grotesque ways. Instead, we get a chaotic, strangely buoyant 1990s crime caper about a washed-up baseball player who just wants to keep his neighbor's cat alive. I am not entirely sure Aronofsky knows how to make a straightforward comedy, but watching him try is endlessly compelling.



The director transports us back to 1998 New York City, which happens to be the exact time and place he shot his anxiety-inducing debut, *Pi*. Yet the city of *Caught Stealing* is not a monochrome nightmare. It is a glittering, grimy playground shot by his longtime cinematographer Matthew Libatique, where danger lurks behind every bodega door. Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) is a former high school baseball phenom whose career ended in a tragic drunk-driving wreck. Now he pours drinks at a Lower East Side dive, nurses his guilt, and relies on his endlessly patient girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). Then his punk-rock neighbor Russ (Matt Smith, sporting an aggressive acid-green mohawk) drops off his cat, Tonic, and skips town. What follows is a dizzying descent into a criminal underworld of Russian mobsters, corrupt cops, and missing cash.



There is a tactile cruelty to the violence here, but it’s played with a wink. Aronofsky literally films a sequence of Hank projectile vomiting from the perspective of the window he is throwing up against. It is gross, entirely unnecessary, and undeniably funny. Hank takes an absurd amount of physical damage over the course of the film. He loses a kidney. He loses the ability to drink. Austin Butler, fresh off the grand theatricality of *Elvis* and the bald villainy of *Dune: Part Two*, strips away all his movie-star polish. Watching him stumble around in gray underwear, bleeding and exhausted, you realize how good he is at playing an ordinary guy who is simply in over his head. His physicality shifts from the confident swagger of an athlete to the defensive crouch of a cornered animal. Caryn James of *The Hollywood Reporter* captured this odd tonal tightrope perfectly, calling the film "an anomaly, a dark soap bubble of an entertainment. And that weirdness makes this unlikely film sparkle."



Whether that weirdness holds together for the entire runtime comes down to your tolerance for overstuffed plotting. The narrative gets undeniably muddy in the second act. Regina King shows up as a dogged detective, and Liev Schreiber drops in as a Hasidic gangster who actually schleps Hank to a family Shabbos dinner mid-kidnapping. It is hilarious, but the film frequently loses track of its emotional core amid the zany character work. Even so, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching a filmmaker stop trying to torture his audience and just let them go along for a ride. *Caught Stealing* is messy and loud. Sometimes that is exactly what you need a movie to be.