It takes a while before “Caught Stealing” really takes off. Probably around the time Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio show up as a pair of Hasidic gangster brothers who interrupt their murder spree to pick up a challah to bring home for Shabbas.
But half the fun — no, make that all the fun — of Darren Aronofsky’s grubby, gritty New York crime thriller is playing Spot the Star. Wait, is that really Bad Bunny (under his real name, Benito Martínez Ocasio) as a violently insecure neighborhood kingpin? Former Dr. Who Matt Smith as an aging punk drug dealer with a Mohawk? Griffin Dunne as the grizzled owner of an East Village dive bar? “Reservation Dogs” breakout talent D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as a doomed college ballplayer? Carol Kane as a bubbe?
Well, yes, Carol Kane as a bubbe is a little on the nose, but it’s fully in keeping with the movie’s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic. The nominal star of “Caught Stealing” is Austin Butler, still trying to shake “Elvis” as a hapless innocent caught up in a spiral of crimes, misdemeanors and colorful villains. Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.
He plays Hank Thompson, a bartender and budding alcoholic in 1998 Manhattan who’s hiding from a tragedy that scotched his chances for a major league baseball career. A glimpse of the twin towers, references to Mayor Giuliani and a general air of societal collapse anchor “Caught Stealing” in a very particular time and place — the Lower East Side just as gentrification is kicking in — and Hank’s neighborhood is in the middle of a violent turf war among various ethnic mobs, with the Russians gaining the upper hand.
The movie also takes place at the end of the 1998 baseball season, as Hank’s beloved San Francisco Giants are vying for the wild-card spot, and we’re invited to see the hero as a similarly scrappy underdog in over his head. He has a lovingly randy paramedic girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), to keep him on the up-and-up and that Mohawked neighbor to ask Hank to cat-sit while he’s out of town. Which is when two Russian enforcers (Yuri Kolokolnikov and an especially terrifying Nikita Kukushkin) show up looking for something the neighbor left behind and Hank makes the mistake of crossing them. He ends up in the hospital minus a kidney, and we’re just getting started.
Before it gets to the grand finale, “Caught Stealing” has brought on Regina King as a tough-talking police detective, a storage-unit key hidden in a most unusual place, a shoot-out and car chase around the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, and a reckless disregard for the lives of the movie’s supporting characters. Butler, whose blue-eyed cool has been put to excellent advantage in “Elvis” and “The Bikeriders,” is a blank canvas that becomes more interesting as it gets battered, torn and bruised, and likewise “Caught Stealing” picks up speed and idiosyncrasy as more and more bad guys are sucked into the mayhem. By the time Lipa (Schreiber) and Shmully (D’Onofrio) arrive to take Hank for a ride, you’re as invested as you’ll ever be.
Can we pause for a moment to scratch our collective heads over the career of Darren Aronofsky? After making his mark with the startling indie dramas “Pi” (1998) and “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), the director veered into mainstream success with “The Wrestler” (2008) and “Black Swan” (2010), took on various aspects of the Book of Genesis (“Noah” in 2014, the allegorical dementia of “Mother!” in 2017), went away for a while and returned with the straight-up-bordering-on-maudlin “The Whale” (2022). “Caught Stealing,” adapted by Charlie Huston from his 2004 novel, seems less a return to grace than an enjoyable busman’s holiday, with attention lavished on a pre-9/11, pre-Bloomberg New York City in all its atavistic splendor. Think Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (1985) with a higher body count.
There are pleasures here, in other words, but you have to have the patience for them. If you do, “Caught Stealing” offers a cameo by an Oscar-winning actress for those willing to stick around through the end credits and a performance by a lovely Maine coon cat named Tonic that is arguably more nuanced than Butler’s.
For the record, the 1998 Giants never made it to the playoffs. Neither does this movie, but it gives it a pretty good shot.
R. At area theaters. Strong violent content, pervasive language, some sexuality/nudity and brief drug use. 107 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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