<\/p>\n
It takes a while before \u201cCaught Stealing\u201d really takes off. Probably around the time Liev Schreiber and Vincent D\u2019Onofrio show up as a pair of Hasidic gangster brothers who interrupt their murder spree to pick up a challah to bring home for Shabbas.<\/p>\n
But half the fun \u2014 no, make that all the fun \u2014 of Darren Aronofsky\u2019s grubby, gritty New York crime thriller is playing Spot the Star. Wait, is that really Bad Bunny (under his real name, Benito Mart\u00ednez 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? \u201cReservation Dogs\u201d breakout talent D\u2019Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as a doomed college ballplayer? Carol Kane as a bubbe?<\/p>\n
Well, yes, Carol Kane as a bubbe is a little on the nose, but it\u2019s fully in keeping with the movie\u2019s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic. The nominal star of \u201cCaught Stealing\u201d is Austin Butler, still trying to shake \u201cElvis\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
He plays Hank Thompson, a bartender and budding alcoholic in 1998 Manhattan who\u2019s 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 \u201cCaught Stealing\u201d in a very particular time and place \u2014 the Lower East Side just as gentrification is kicking in \u2014 and Hank\u2019s neighborhood is in the middle of a violent turf war among various ethnic mobs, with the Russians gaining the upper hand.<\/p>\n
The movie also takes place at the end of the 1998 baseball season, as Hank\u2019s beloved San Francisco Giants are vying for the wild-card spot, and we\u2019re invited to see the hero as a similarly scrappy underdog in over his head. He has a lovingly randy paramedic girlfriend, Yvonne (Zo\u00eb Kravitz), to keep him on the up-and-up and that Mohawked neighbor to ask Hank to cat-sit while he\u2019s 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\u2019re just getting started.<\/p>\n
Before it gets to the grand finale, \u201cCaught Stealing\u201d 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\u2019s supporting characters. Butler, whose blue-eyed cool has been put to excellent advantage in \u201cElvis\u201d and \u201cThe Bikeriders,\u201d is a blank canvas that becomes more interesting as it gets battered, torn and bruised, and likewise \u201cCaught Stealing\u201d picks up speed and idiosyncrasy as more and more bad guys are sucked into the mayhem. By the time Lipa (Schreiber) and Shmully (D\u2019Onofrio) arrive to take Hank for a ride, you\u2019re as invested as you\u2019ll ever be.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cPi\u201d (1998) and \u201cRequiem for a Dream\u201d (2000), the director veered into mainstream success with \u201cThe Wrestler\u201d (2008) and \u201cBlack Swan\u201d (2010), took on various aspects of the Book of Genesis (\u201cNoah\u201d in 2014, the allegorical dementia of \u201cMother!\u201d in 2017), went away for a while and returned with the straight-up-bordering-on-maudlin \u201cThe Whale\u201d (2022). \u201cCaught Stealing,\u201d adapted by Charlie Huston from his 2004 novel, seems less a return to grace than an enjoyable busman\u2019s holiday, with attention lavished on a pre-9\/11, pre-Bloomberg New York City in all its atavistic splendor. Think Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cAfter Hours\u201d (1985) with a higher body count.<\/p>\n
There are pleasures here, in other words, but you have to have the patience for them. If you do, \u201cCaught Stealing\u201d 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n
For the record, the 1998 Giants never made it to the playoffs. Neither does this movie, but it gives it a pretty good shot.<\/p>\n
R<\/b>. At area theaters. Strong violent content, pervasive language, some sexuality\/nudity and brief drug use. 107 minutes.<\/p>\n