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.

Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Gillian Berrie, David Mackenzie and Teddy Schwarzman   Director: David Mackenzie   Screenplay: Justin Piasecki   Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, Pun Bandhu, Eisa Davis, Matthew Maher, Seth Barrish, Victor Garber, Jamil Haque and Jamie Ann Burke   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

It’s fixer versus fixer in this cerebral new action flick from first-time feature writer Justin Piasecki and director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”).  “Relay” calls to mind memorable paranoid thrillers of the seventies like “The Conversation,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View,” and while it gets a mite too clever for its own good down the home stretch, overall it’s an intelligent cinematic puzzle that generally plays fair with the audience.

Driving its pulse rate is intense, febrile Riz Ahmed, who’s Ash, a former broker who turned to drink in despair over the unscrupulous financial dealings he’d accommodated himself to and is now a recovering alcoholic.  He supports himself by helping would-be whistleblowers who are having second thoughts about putting their lives on the line to return whatever incriminating documents they possess to their old employers for a cash payment and future security.  As the film opens, he’s shown overseeing the rigid protocol he’s arranged for a nervous man named Hoffman (Matthew Maher) turn over such material to the head of a pharmaceutical company (Victor Garber) and then seeing the fellow off to a new life.

Shortly afterward Sarah Grant (Lily James) is referred to him by a lawyer (Seth Barrish) she’s consulted in hopes of returning to the biotech firm from which she was recently dismissed internal test results documenting potentially harmful effects from genetically modified grain the company plans to promote.  Now finding herself under surveillance by the firm, she’s reconsidered her intention to become a whistleblower and needs assistance in safely returning the data.

Ash responds to her through his usual means—a telephone relay firm, usually employed by those with speech or hearing problems, that allows one to converse using a keyboard rather than viva voce, and that immediately deletes the conversation with no trail that could allow it to be traced.  He agrees to take her case, but instructs her on the elaborate procedures she must follow to insure that he can never be identified—and that by using the postal system and other means, they can always stay a step ahead of the surveillance team, manned by Dawson (Sam Worthington) with his confederates Rosetti (Willa Fitzgerald) and Ryan (Jared Abrahamson), the company has assigned to follow her every move.

One gets a kick out of watching as Ash, a sort of super-controlled one-man army, outfoxes the surveillance team over and over again, particularly through the employment of the relay system; although watching him typing out messages to be transmitted to Sarah by the firm’s team of stone-faced operators could get tiresome, Mackenzie, working with cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, production designer Jane Musky and editor Matt Mayer, keeps the process from becoming tedious.  Adding to the tension is the fact that as the days pass and their interaction grows increasingly complex, Ash and Sarah develop a bond in which she becomes interested in him as a person and he becomes more and more protective of her, setting aside the nothing-but-business attitude he’s always maintained to protect himself.

And when Sarah makes a mistake in following his instructions, he has to decide whether to violate his usual strict procedures by stepping aside when the pursuers get close.  The choice he makes will put both of them in peril and lead to a sequence at a crowded concert hall where a piano trio is performing Schubert—a well-choreographed episode that might remind you of the ones Hitchcock memorably staged in such venues.  But that’s not the end: there’s a twist you probably won’t be expecting, an abduction and a chase—all things that explain why Ash chose as his AA sponsor a cop named Wash (Eisa Davis), whose presence proves invaluable in explaining a denouement right out of the “Condor” playbook (though it requires you to set aside an observation about media revelations of corporate skullduggery that Dawson has quite reasonably argued).

In fact, the plot of “Relay” requires you to overlook a lot of implausibility, in particular how each turn is based on accurate predictions about how the other side will respond to every pre-plotted tactic.  But that’s the nature of the genre: in retrospect you might be prompted to scrutinize each step along the way and decide that the whole intricate contraption is just too convenient to swallow.

As things are unfolding, however, you’re unlikely to be bothered by this, especially since Ahmed brings such quiet ferocity to Ash that he carries the film over any rough spots.  James is fine but unexceptional, while Worthington makes a hissable villain.  So does Garber, who in a very brief role is the very model of the detestable corporate bad-guy.  The use of NYC locations, shot in tones of gloomy menace by Nuttgens, is a definite plus, with an exciting Times Square sequence once again calling Hitchcock to mind.  Tony Doogan’s score is broodingly melancholic except when called on to pump up the action.

“Relay” adds enough inventive touches to an old template to bring the vintage paranoid thriller to life again, if not to make for an instant classic.