It feels too easy to say Darren Aronofsky is the one who gets caught stealing in his latest directorial outing, not in the least because he doesn’t seem to hide his intentions. Caught Stealing, his 1998-set crime thriller, is not shy about showing its inspirations from similar misadventures set in the Big Apple. Casting Griffin Dunne in a supporting role harkens back to After Hours; a speeding car under some elevated subway tracks recalls The French Connection; even the presence of an unwitting feline sidekick seems to wink at Inside Llewyn Davis.
While some of Aronofsky’s auteurist stamp gets lost restaging some of Gotham’s greatest cinematic hits, Caught Stealing hardly feels like director-for-hire work. The filmmaker, himself a born-and-bred New Yorker, made his name staging anxiety-ridden stories on the city streets. But Aronofsky’s films, be they scrappy indies such as Pi or flashier outings like Black Swan, have tended to center on characters whose psychoses are primarily internal in origin but get amplified by the concrete jungle’s overstimulation. He’s never had a protagonist quite like Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson. The baseball phenom-turned-Lower East Side bartender at the heart of Caught Stealing is a hero in the mold of a classic Hitchcockian “wrong man.” Following a sporting career that ended early in ignominy, Hank is not seeking any more trouble than a night of heavy drinking or hooking up with his situationship (Zoë Kravitz). But all it takes is agreeing to cat-sit for his British neighbour, Matt Smith’s mohawked punk Russ, to find himself drawn into an underworld of criminality by association alone.
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These various unsavoury figures Hank encounters cut a wide cross-section across New York’s ethnically diverse makeup. If they didn’t cause so much misery, these characters could be paraded around like amusing attractions at a nightclub Stefon might announce. This movie has everything: a Puerto Rican enforcer (Bad Bunny), a pair of Russian-Ukrainian thugs (one of whom is played with a scene-stealing feral streak by Nikita Kukushkin), a thickly-accented New York detective (Regina King), two Hasidic gangsters (Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio), and Carol Kane serving matzoh ball soup.
Charlie Huston’s script for Caught Stealing, based on his novel of the same name, always hints that it’s on the verge of some grand point about New York. That never arrives, but simply putting such a vibrant mosaic of the city’s population on display makes a statement. The film is more focused on providing a fun ride through grimy streets and dark alleys across three different boroughs than on presenting a thesis on gentrification. Aronofsky, however, conveys his perspective through the material more clearly than Huston. Even on a project like Caught Stealing, he still finds a way to incorporate his fascination with people who push their bodies to their breaking point. Hank endures most of the film’s action while barely holding together a series of stitches from a recent surgery. Every blow he takes along this journey to escape the underworld’s clutches registers with bruising, bloody force.
Aronofsky might not push any of these moments to the extremes of his horror-adjacent work, but it’s a notably more gruesome approach than most studio fare. If this is what his version of “selling out” to the system looks like, other directors should be so lucky to make something this satisfying. Credit to Aronofsky: he gets caught trying.
