Austin Butler has proved himself something of a savant at playing aloof beauties like the impulsive Benny in The Bikeriders, the cultish internet grifter Vernon in Eddington, the sociopathic princeling Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two, or Elvis — men whose vacancy only enhances their undeniable magnetism. But in Darren Aronofsky’s new ’90s-set crime comedy Caught Stealing, Butler plays a character who doesn’t get the benefit of being perceived primarily from a distance, and it’s a fascinatingly terrible fit. He’s Hank Thompson, a former baseball phenom who never got a chance to go pro and who fled small-town California for New York City, where he has been hiding out in a bottle while working as a bartender ever since. You can see the star Hank was convinced he would become when he was sure he’d get drafted right out of high school, have his pick of teams, and opt to lend his talents to his beloved San Francisco Giants. It’s just impossible to buy him as a languishing loser fixated on what he lost while refusing to acknowledge the part he played in his own destruction.
It doesn’t help that Butler, who, at 34, still looks like a kid when he flashes a particular toothy grin, has the angel face and Hollywood body of someone who is definitely not necking bottles of Miller High Life for breakfast the way Hank does. But there’s no spiritual wear on Butler’s Hank either, no sense that he has accrued any significant history with the city at all — he moves through Caught Stealing like a visitor participating in an especially elaborate Airbnb Experience, rather than someone living his life. The only real personal connection he has is with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), a sultry paramedic he’s been hooking up with, who eyes him with the skepticism of someone wondering if she’s wasting her time. Meanwhile, he wears his teenage trauma so close to the surface that it leaks out via nightmares he regularly has about the accident that ended his athletic career before it began. When Hank informs a cop that he’s been in New York for over a decade, the line is downright disorienting; he just doesn’t have the stink of someone who has been wallowing in bitterness and denial for years. Butler plays the character like a recent arrival.
Caught Stealing is an intermittently fun experience that would be a better time if Aronofsky either loosened up a little more or, conversely, maintained a tighter grip on the wheel. As it is, the movie — adapted by Charlie Huston from his own 2005 novel — is frustratingly ramshackle. Sometimes it’s a gritty noir caper and other times a character study. Aronofsky favors the latter, though Butler’s shortcomings in that regard are compounded by how Hank’s just not that compelling a guy. While he shares some of their tendencies, he’s not another of Aronofsky’s obsessives, like Black Swan’s Nina Sayers or The Wrestler’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson. Instead, he’s more like the empty space left behind when the source of an obsession gets taken away. He keeps track of his team, talks to his mom on the phone, works and drinks at a Lower East Side dive named for its hard-partying owner, Paul (Griffin Dunne), and flirts with alcoholism. While these elements could add up to a whole existence, they simply don’t onscreen. Thus there’s not much reason to mourn when it all starts collapsing after some thugs come in search of the British punk who lives next door (Matt Smith, in a part even more forehead driven than usual) and decide to target Hank for the guy’s whereabouts.
Still, as you’d expect from Aronofsky, a born-and-bred Brooklynite who takes his New York bona fides very seriously, Caught Stealing’s Giuliani-era trappings are drawn very well (and not just owing to prime use of a snippet from Meredith Brooks’s one-hit wonder, “Bitch”). The director’s choice to layer the title of his film over the twin World Trade Center towers is a too-eager jab to the ribs, but the rest of the period setting is informed by a wry acknowledgment of downtown Manhattan’s comparative 1998 squalor, photographed with grimy exquisiteness by Matthew Libatique. Hank seems to float above the actual plot, making it easier to focus on what’s going on around the edges. That’s also the most perverse aspect of the film. Caught Stealing sustains itself on peripheral characters, from Kravitz’s grunge dream girl to a seen-it-all detective played by Regina King to George Abud as Hank’s exasperated normie-work-hours neighbor, while inflicting enough carnage on them that the film sours. It’s hard to invest in the survival of its passive protagonist when so many more colorful people around him suffer on his behalf. At least the cat survives, which is something I refuse to categorize as a spoiler.
Bud, a well-behaved feline who only occasionally gets bite-y, becomes Hank’s most constant companion on an odyssey that takes him from Chinatown to Coney Island to Corona and through run-ins with brutal Russian gangsters (Yuri Kolokolnikov, Nikita Kukushkin); a florid, pistol-flaunting nightclub owner (Bad Bunny); and two Hasidic mobsters played by Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber, who turn out to be the scariest foes of all. They’re also incredibly funny, insisting on a stop at their bubbe’s house on the way to a shoot-up because it’s Shabbat, enabling a scene in which Carol Kane serves matzo-ball soup to a yarmulke-wearing Butler. A more enjoyable movie would let scenes like that breathe a bit more, rather than rushing to the inevitable showdown. But Caught Stealing finds more pathos in the endangerment of a pet than the death of a female character, and it’s forever in a hurry to the next violent confrontation when all of its best parts are the ones in between.
The ’90s-set crime comedy from Darren Aronofsky is watchable only because of its side characters.
