Producers: Jeremy Dawson, Dylan Golden, Ari Handel and Darren Aronofsky Director: Darren Aronofsky Screenplay: Charlie Huston Cast: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Griffin Dunne, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Nikita Kukushkin, Shaun O’Hagan, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Action Bronson, George Abud and Carol Kane Distributor: Sony Entertainment/Columbia Pictures
Grade: B
The “wrong man” scenario is a venerable cinematic genre—Hitchcock, of course, employed the topos repeatedly—and Darren Aronofsky offers his take on it in “Caught Stealing,” which Charlie Huston adapted from their own 2004 novel. Like Hitch’s various entries in the field, Aronofsky’s depends in large measure on a charismatic star—Austin Butler. He plays Hank Thompson, Huston’s erstwhile high school baseball star, a one-time golden boy who’s now a rumpled, emotionally tormented bartender living in a cheap apartment in the shabby New York City of the nineties. Hank’s unwittingly dragged into a street war over a stash of drug money that’s gone missing, and suffers misery after misery at the hands of those looking for it.
Not that the worst of the miseries are Hank’s. He gets beaten up repeatedly, to be sure, but others fare far worse. By the end of the movies, dead bodies litter the landscape, and the corpses include a few that Hank—and you—will regret seeing die (though there are far more who deserve what they get). At the start of the murderous process the effect is startling, especially as Aronofsky, cinematographer Matthew Libatique and editor Andrew Weisblum stage the scenes, but over time the violence grows nonchalant, played with a casual shrug that gives the entire exercise a nihilistic vibe that mirrors the grime and crime of the Giuliani-era Big Apple in which it’s set, expertly captured in Mark Weinberg’s production design.
At first Hank is portrayed as a rumpled, abstracted fellow working at a dumpy bar owned by scruffy, pony-tail-wearing Paul (Griffin Dunne, whose presence seems a wink to another New York City nightmare movie, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours”). Hank also has a girlfriend, paramedic Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz); their chemistry sizzles, but she’s upset by his recklessness and refusal to come clean about the trauma behind his actual nightmares, which flash back to the alcohol-driven car crash that wrecked his knee, ending his hopes for a baseball career, as well as the life of his high school buddy Dale (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), for whose death he feels responsible.
The plot kicks in when Hank’s neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), a Mohawk-coiffed motor-mouth Brit straight out of Guy Ritchie territory, announces he’s off to the homeland to tend to his ill father and asks him to take care of his cat Bud (played by a feline named Tonic) while he’s away. He reluctantly agrees, and Yvonne volunteers to assist.
Unfortunately associates of Russ soon appear seeking something the guy has apparently absconded with, and Hank gets in their way. First up are brutal Russian mobsters Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin), who enjoy pummeling him so badly he requires surgery; they’re eventually joined by an affected confederate who calls himself Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny). When Hank finally goes to the cops, hand-bitten Detective Roman (Regina King) tells him that he’s been sucked into something involving drug money and warns him that while the Russians are bad, he should beware a pair of Hasidic Jews she calls “scary monsters,” who are far worse.
Of course Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio) Drucker soon show up and prove as menacing as Roman had predicted, though they put a pause to the mayhem by taking Hank to a Shabbos dinner with their Bubbe (Carol Kane). Russ comes back from England, too, and for a time he and Hank become partners, though also rivals, in trying to bring the escalating mess to a resolution.
To be honest, Huston and Aronofsky aren’t terribly successful in structuring their plot—the relationships among all the nasty characters are never really made clear, and the key that proves integral to unlocking the treasure everyone’s seeking proves to be hidden in a particularly unsavory place. But its location somehow mirrors the entire movie, because inside what is, after all, a most unpleasant tale is the opportunity for Butler to show off a grubby, vulnerable side unlike anything he’s done before; and though the pose doesn’t come naturally to him, he pulls it off through sheer force of will. The ending to the picture, moreover, brings a strong dose of the mordancy that’s infused the story throughout, with Hank’s physical and psychological escape made possible by a trick of fate—his being forced by the Druckers to drive again, something he’s avoided since his life-changing accident—and a droll identity switch.
The rest of the cast play second fiddle to Butler, but Aronofsky gives each of them moments to shine, and they seize gleefully on them. While Smith and Ocasio will probably share the limelight with their off-the-wall turns, the real treat comes in watching Schreiber and D’Onofrio doing what amounts to an extended vaudeville routine as the observant but utterly amoral Druckers, with Kane in her cameo adding to the incongruity. And one certainly shouldn’t forget Tonic, a cat that comes close to stealing the show; Bud, always described as “a biter” except for a favored few, is as central a presence here as Frodo was in “A Quiet Place: Day One,” and richly deserves its animated appearance in the final credits, since the feline is central to the plot mechanics not once but twice. Don’t blink or you’ll miss an uncredited cameo at the end.
“Caught Stealing” is the first of three books Huston has written about Hank Thompson, so Aronofsky’s movie could be the beginning of a series. Only time will tell. In the meantime, it’s enjoyable as a stand-alone thriller—if, that is, you can put up with the extreme violence occasionally laced with some very morbid humor, and with the percussion-heavy score by Rob Simonsen that bangs away ferociously throughout.