★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Darren Aronofsky, a gifted mad poet of a director, specializes in cinema portraits of characters coming apart. Think of Natalie Portman as an unglued ballerina in “Black Swan” or Brendan Fraser eating himself to death in “The Whale”—both actors won Oscars for their roles by the way. Aronofsky knows from existential dread and can pick just the right actors to play it.
Next up is Austin Butler, an Oscar nominee for embodying the rise and fall of Elvis. In “Caught Stealing,” Aronofsky has cast Butler as Hank Thompson, who’s been living it boozy in 1998 New York with hot girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) and tending late-shift bar in a dive on the Lower East Side. Not bad for a guy who lost his shot at pro baseball by crashing his car to avoid hitting a cow. So what could go wrong, Hank thinks, with catsitting for his neighbor?
Cut to God laughing at that one. No knock on the kitty, a Maine Coon named Bud with a scene-stealing side-eye. It’s the neighbor, Russ, a Mohawked rocker embodied by the great Matt Smith as a fun blend of gutter and crazy—that Russian mobsters come to hunt down. Finding Hank instead, they beat him so bad he loses a kidney. Cue Aronofsky’s take on Dante’s Inferno.
Aronofsky rubs the blood and guts in our faces with so much glee you can almost picture him laughing behind the camera.
Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel for the screen, has given Aronofsky a lot of candidates to inhabit his circles of hell. Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio have a blast playing Hassidic hitmen, Lipa and Shmully, with a Jewish mother that Carol Kane hams (excuse the word) to the hilt. And just wait for Benito Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, as a Puerto Rican club owner.
Kudos as well to the dynamite Regina King as hard-assed NYPD Detective Roman, who refuses to accept that Hank is really the victim of mistaken identity, despite the bruises that make him look like a battered shell of his once pretty self. Aronofsky and camera wiz Matthew Libatique paint this neighborhood with such graphic affection you can almost inhale its toxic fumes.
Aronofsky rubs the blood and guts in our faces with so much glee you can almost picture him laughing behind the camera. Hank is not laughing. Watching the bodies pile up as his life slides down the tubes fills Hank with a real desperation that feels at odds with the film’s more comic tone.
Aronofsky may have intended “Caught Stealing” as a racy ride through the night, a crowd-pleaser meant to feed an audience need for escapism untroubled by thought. I’ve read some reviews that see it that way. But that’s not Aronofsky. And it’s not Butler, whose total commitment provides the film with a center of emotional gravity that holds to the ground while the ground keeps shifting. For me, you can’t have one without the other.