‘Caught Stealing’ Review: Austin Butler in a Cartoonishly Violent Thriller

A filmmaker far more accustomed to dense, formally elaborate auteur dramas than to commercial thrillers, Caught Stealing looks, sounds, and ultimately plays like a surprisingly odd detour for Darren Aronofsky. Here, the director of Black Swan, mother! and The Whale delivers the closest thing to a mainstream movie he’s ever made: a wild, darkly comic thriller so thoroughly steeped in ’90s energy that it’s literally set in 1998. It’s not a great film—not even close—but considering the baroque excesses of his more personal projects, its looseness comes as a welcome change of pace. Especially from someone not exactly known for his sense of humor.

Caught Stealing is based on the first novel in Charlie Huston’s “Henry Thompson” trilogy, and from the start it announces itself as a retro cocktail mixed with ingredients straight out of mid-’90s Quentin Tarantino and Coen brothers: a violent crime plot propelled by a parade of dim, over-the-top characters, the kind who seem to exist only in Elmore Leonard paperbacks or the films inspired by them.

Austin Butler plays Henry “Hank” Thompson, a former baseball prospect whose career imploded after an accident shredded his knee (among other things). Hank now works (and drinks) as a bartender at a Lower East Side joint back when the neighborhood was just beginning to gentrify and still felt rough around the edges. One day, his neighbor Russ (Matt Smith)—a punk, British, mohawked tornado—flies home to see his sick father and leaves Hank with his feral cat and the keys to his apartment. The next morning, a pair of violent Russian heavies show up at Russ’s place, run into Hank, and beat him senseless for reasons he can’t begin to understand.

That attack sets off a chain of chaotic misunderstandings that push Hank and his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) into the path of an increasingly bizarre lineup of characters. Beyond the hulking Russian enforcers, they’re soon trailed by two equally brutal Orthodox Jews (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), a Latino mobster (Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny, now firmly pursuing his acting career), a police detective (Regina King) who may or may not be on their side, and Hank’s bar owner (Griffin Dunne). All of them get tangled in a messy situation that keeps swelling in scale—and especially in violence.

Where Aronofsky’s hand is clearest is in the film’s unapologetically bloody streak. Even within the movie’s heightened, tongue-in-cheek tone, Caught Stealing pushes things far further than most stories of this type usually dare. The director of The Wrestler shoots the violence with a blunt, almost matter-of-fact realism, especially in the first half. Hank spends days on the run—getting into vicious fights—just after losing a kidney in a particularly vivid sequence. And he’s not the only one who loses organs over the film’s tight 107 minutes.

At times, the movie brings to mind Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, mainly because it roams through the streets of pre-Disneyfied Lower Manhattan. In other moments—especially its urban texture and its brushes with sports culture, including a run-in with baseball fans pouring out of a game—it feels faintly indebted to Spike Lee. But beyond its convincing sense of place and the blistering soundtrack by British post-punk band Idles, Caught Stealing doesn’t fully escape the familiar formulas of the British-gangster mode so dear to the Guy Ritchies of the world, albeit without the same level of visual fireworks.

In its final half hour, Aronofsky finally seems to lock into the movie’s true tone—helped along by the arrival of Carol Kane as a Jewish bobe and a second, more surprising cameo late in the game—and Caught Stealing fully embraces pure, unabashed absurdity. Before that pivot, it feels as if the director is trying to take things at least somewhat seriously—building in trauma, nightmares, and backstory for Hank—but after one particularly extreme and personal death, the movie seems to hit a reset button and start fresh in a much lighter key. It’s jarring until the film settles into something closer to a live-action Looney Tunes routine. And there, as our dazed, limping antihero is chased across New York by assassins of wildly different backgrounds, the film makes one thing clear: in this city, even the criminal underworld is a melting pot.