It’s last call at Paul’s, the dive bar down the block from Benny’s Burritos on the corner of 6th and Ave. A, and folks are getting rowdy. The year is 1998. The place is New York’s Lower East Side, before the danger was fully leached out of the boho-hipster paradise; back then, the neighborhood may have lacked the scuzzy allure of its post-Horror City iteration back in the late 1970s, but it’s still edgy enough. The dude ringing the drink-up bell is Hank (Austin Butler). He calls the shots — as well as pours them — at Paul’s while the hippie-ish owner (Griffin Dunne) whose name is on the sign banters with the regulars. Hank was once a baseball phenom who had a shot at the pros back in the Bay Area, until a car accident put the kibosh on his sports career. Now he works the bar, downs beers, and hooks up with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), his incredibly understanding EMT girlfriend. Life is good. Or, at the very least, its a good enough life for a handsome twentysomething with a drinking problem and penchant for stripping down to his skivvies more often than not.
Then our man’s next-door neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), a spirit-of-’77 punk rocker from England, asks him to watch his cat when he has a last-minute trip home. And, of course, gangsters show up and guns go off and people start dying over “an exotically huge amount of cash” and damn it if it all doesn’t just go to shit. Classic late-Nineties LES, people.
A woozy adaptation of Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel (the author also wrote the screenplay), Caught Stealing rewinds the book’s post-9/11 action back a half-dozen years to a simpler, semi-grittier time in the big city — the Twin Towers are still in the background, the original Kim’s Video is still standing, Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” is still the first choice for a contemporary drunken sing-along. 1010 Wins plays on every car radio, the hero’s couture du jour is a Cherry Tavern T-shirt, and a villain takes time out from being villainous to extol the virtues of a black-and-white cookie. It’s a New York movie, in other words, infused with period nostalgia courtesy of its New York born-and-raised director, Darren Aronofsky.
This isn’t the surreal, go-for-baroque Aronofsky of Pi (1998), Black Swan (2010) or Mother (2017), however. Nor is it the rough-hewn humanist who gave us the sad-sack parables The Wrestler (2008) and The Whale (2022). Aronofsky’s take on this material is, to borrow a term from the game that’s both Hank’s obsession and a reminder of his failure, a straight-down-the-middle pitch compared to his usual mind blowers. It’s also oddly bifurcated into two noticeably chunks, with the first half focusing on Hank and Yvonne’s tender but touchy, highly tectchy relationship and the second half leaning into the gonzo forward momentum of a get-the-dough crime flick. We’ll kindly suggest that one section plays stronger than the other. But the filmmaker’s distinct fondness for the bygone era of a slightly less gentrified downtown is evident, and goes a long way to adding color and a sense of character to what sometimes feels like After Hours hopped up on Red Bull and Zima.
Not that the film lacks for characters, NYC specific or otherwise. There are the Russian thugs, Aleksei (Yuri Kolokohnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin); the latter, a diminutive cannonball nicknamed “Microbe,” is a dead ringer for Dominique Pinon’s baldheaded hoodlum in 1981’s tonally similar French thriller Diva. There’s the gents’ boss, Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, a.k.a. Bad Bunny, clearly having a blast), a Puerto Rican kingpin pining for his missing loot. There’s a narcotic detective, Roman (Regina King), who’s aggressively sniffing around after Hank catches a serious beating. There’s Bud the biting cat, played by a feline named Tonic and who deserves a three-picture deal.
And, may God eternally bless them, there are the Drucker brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Schmully (Vincent D’Onofrio), the homicidal Hasidic mobsters who still make time to visit their bubbe on the way to a massacre. The rapport between these two veteran actors turn what could have been seriously dodgy caricatures into a first-rate double act — think Abbott and Costello with sidecurls and silencers. Their increased presence in the third act is welcome, and should Mr. Hudson and Mr. Aronofsky want to start penning a Drucker-centric prequel, please note we already have our checkbook out.
Yet, in the end, none of the ensemble members matter, despite the extra brio they bring to the table. Because Caught Stealing is really about one person, a ordinary guy caught up in the sort of extraordinary, extremely violent circumstances that used to give Hitchcock a standing Hampton. Or rather, it’s about one performer in particular. If you caught Austin Butler on Broadway during his run in The Iceman Cometh back in 2018, you could tell he was a young talent willing to take on a daunting role. He proved he could make an impact with minimum running time in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and, more recently, Eddington; demonstrated an ability to go full-Method-jacket if needed with Elvis and or trot out a mean James Dean vibe in The Bikeriders; and displayed a disposition for immersive freak-flag-flying in Dune: Part Two. A nagging question remained. Could this photogenic, moody, charismatic actor carry a movie on his own if needed to?
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We now have our answer. You may go into this throwback-in-more-ways-than-one thriller because of the director attached to it, either out of longstanding fandom or a sense of auteurist completism. You will leave fully realizing its not the latest Darren Aronofksy movie so much as the first actual Austin Butler movie, in which the A-list–adjacent gent isn’t catching your attention because he’s an alabaster alien maniac, or the King of Rock & Roll, or part of a larger chorus line high-kicking behind a bigger name. All he has to rely on here is pure screen presence and star wattage, and Butler completely makes it work. The guy can command a screen without having to play second fiddle to an I.P. or prosthetics or a far more famous costar. Caught Stealing is a decent wild ride through the past, filled with enough memory-bank fodder and hairpin turns to keep you engaged. It’s a much better proof of concept for upgrading Butler’s status. He’s now a bona fide leading man without any frills or caveats attached. Act accordingly.
From Rolling Stone US
