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Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) was born and bred San Francisco Giants baseball. Named after one of the most significant Giants in major league history––back when they were the New York Giants, a clever nod from writer Charlie Huston, who adapted his own novel for the screen––high school Hank leaned into his legacy with enough bravado to go pro, a surefire first round pick. But a leg-splitting car crash brought his athletic career to a screeching, permanent halt.
Now, as a sensually disheveled 20- or 30-something drunk, he doesn’t let life in New York hamper his daily devotion to the game, even if his connection to it still rips him awake at night in traumatizing flashbang replays of the crash. Slinging drinks to a terminally regular group of barflies at a near-religious Giants bar on the Lower East Side, Hank’s found his home on the opposite coast. Despite the smokey bad boy front, he’s a simple man who sticks to a small handful of things: dogs, drinks, baseball, calling his mom, and girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). Needless to say, his world turns upside-down when cats, sobriety, and murderous criminal trouble enter the picture.
An oft-exhilarating take on the worn genre––with the occasional caving to a tired trope––Aronofsky’s newest joins the upper echelons of lonely-man-with-cat(s) cinema, in the ranks of The Long Goodbye, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Children of Men. It doesn’t sit quite so high in the much-busier upper echelons of crime cinema, but that’s a major bar to clear. As it turns out, the cat and sobriety end up being blessings in disguise. The entangled web of crazed killers, on the other hand…
It all starts when Hank’s drug-dealing Brit-punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) asks Hank to watch his cat while he flies home to his dying father. Hank reluctantly agrees, unaware of the violence he’s inviting upon him and those nearby. What ensues is a non-stop criminal-underworld rollercoaster of black comedy and pitch-black drama that brutalizes Hank’s body and, in trademark Aronofsky fashion, tortures his psyche. From cruel Russian mobsters to murdering Hasidic “monsters” to cornering NYPD detectives to Bad Bunny playing a guy called “Colorado,” Hank is punched, kicked, kneed, batted, thrown, and whacked around the boroughs of New York like a pinball with no say in what happens next.
Aronofsky doesn’t let the commercial nature of his first crime film, which blends the zany caper and gritty-dark corners of the genre to pummeling effect, distract from his calling-card approach of provoking both subjects and viewers. Between the many pokes at race relations and tropes, someone point-blank vomiting on the lens, and bone-crunching brutality, Caught Stealing is as tough to swallow as most Aronofsky pictures. What could evoke a stronger reaction of Manhattan than the Twin Towers, the first image Aronofsky serves up of the beautifully reconstructed 1998 New York City?
Proving immense technical savvy around and knowledge of his native city, Aronofsky sets the grand, unending fool’s errand across a wealth of iconic settings: a singular car chase through the cramped streets of Chinatown; a seminal Unisphere sequence at Flushing Meadows Park; a raucous return to Requiem’s Brighton Beach area where he was born. Longtime DP Matthew Libatique shoots this scurrying film with as much energy and inspiration as the two made their first works, together in New York.
In tandem with being Aronofsky’s most commercial film, Caught Stealing is also the provocateur’s first feature attempt at capturing any sort of pop-culture zeitgeist, this one in the shape of the Hey, Arnold!-meets-Nirvana aesthetic that’s blown up all over again in the mid-2020s. The ’90s of it all does the heaviest lifting, the grunge-slacker clothes, cars, bars, and overall aesthetics of the time period on beautiful display. Hank’s characterization––the freshly modernized, sad broke boy who’s as rugged and hot as he is aimless and futureless––touches on the zeitgeist in a similar way as Chris Evans in Materialists.
A supporting cast for the ages fills out every twist and turn of the caper with a familiar face (or one you won’t soon forget): Regina King, Vincent D’Onofrio, Liev Schrieber, Carol Kane, Griffin Dunne, Smith, Kravitz, Bunny, plenty more, some fun surprises that I’ll leave to surprise, and relative newcomer Nikita Kukushkin, who manages to be the #1 stand-out as an absolutely deranged henchman. Whether it’s a new chapter for Aronofsky or a tangential dip into different territory, Caught Stealing proves the auteur hasn’t lost his touch.
Caught Stealing is now playing in wide release.
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