NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is replete with drugs, violence and four-letter words, and yet it’s the closest thing he’s made to a crowd-pleaser. Sure, it has the bludgeoning brutality and go-go-go pacing of his most ruthless movies, but it also has plenty of zany comedy, a matinee idol star, a sprawling cast of colorful villains, and even a cute cat that gets a lot of reaction shots.
The script was adapted by Charlie Huston from his own novel, the first in a series centered on the exploits of disgraced ex-baseball phenom Hank Thompson. As Caught Stealing begins, Hank (Austin Butler) hasn’t picked up a bat in years. He slings drinks at a crusty dive bar and gets trashed every night.
It’s the late ’90s in New York City, and the film is as much about its milieu as its characters. This turns into one of those scurry-across-the-city movies, where our hero runs from place to place and encounters increasingly vicious bad guys everywhere he goes. It’s in the storied tradition of seedy, manic New York movies—The Warriors, Scorsese’s After Hours, the more recent Uncut Gems and Anora—with characters being chased by the consequences of their worst decisions.
Like so many noir heroes, Hank is dogged by a tragedy in his past, one he feels responsible for. And as in so many noir plots, his proximity to crime is purely circumstantial. In fact, it stems from a selfless deed: His neighbor, a mohawked British punk named Russ (Matt Smith), is leaving the country, and Hank agrees to look after his cat. What he doesn’t know is that Russ owes a bunch of money to some mobsters, and two Russian heavies show up, encounter Hank and beat him so senselessly they rupture a kidney.
But Hank’s up against a lot more than just clenched fists and steel-toed boots; there are guns of all calibers, a glovebox full of grenades, and a grisly ordeal involving surgical staples and a pair of pliers. The only reason Hank is able to bumble his way through is that everyone else is just slightly more bumbling than he is.
Along the way, we’re introduced to a melting pot of supporting characters: Hank’s boss (Griffin Dunne), who has more than liquor behind his bar; a Puerto Rican gangster (Benito Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny) whose bark is worse than his bite; a narcotics detective (Regina King) with ulterior motives; and a pair of Hasidic hitmen (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) who drive around in a wood-paneled minivan. Lost in all this is Hank’s paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), who loves Hank and is thus dragged into the whirlpool.
Aronofsky has always been a heavy-handed director, and his breathing-down-your-neck style can electrify a psychological freak-out like Black Swan and torpedo a mawkish theatrical adaptation like The Whale. But here he has a lightness of touch he hasn’t displayed since 2008’s The Wrestler, although this has a far grittier, more hedonistic streak that’s reminiscent of his abrasive earlier work.
What’s curious about the movie is that it never develops any real pit-in-the-stomach tension. Even the violence, as queasy as it often is, doesn’t pack the wallop we expect from Aronofsky. Maybe that’s because the situation is too absurd, the leaps in logic too precipitous, so that we don’t take any of its few serious moments, well, seriously. We enjoy the ride, but we’re never on the edge of our seats. This works best as a gonzo caricature of neo-noir.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM on KPBX.