Caught Stealing: Aronofsky’s Latest work is a Wild Ride Through the Grit of ’90s New York crime underbelly

Starring Austin Butler and Zoë Kravitz, Caught Stealing has some of the Guy Ritchie feel gone American, though with a dash of Baby Driver’s energy too, or maybe the driving sequence simply reminded me of that, both have unwilling drivers behind the wheel. 

Austin Butler is Hank, a New York bartender and diehard Giants fan, and yes, we learn in two seconds that his baseball cap is practically stitched to his head. Every conversation he has with his mom on the phone (which is a lot) ends with a “Go Giants,” even when he’s trying to convey that the gravity of the situation he has called into.  A bit disturbing, but okay.

He has a close relationship with booze, which helps him soothe the nightmares he has from the traumatic car accident that killed his best friend and left him with a knee injury when he was a teenager. The accident also cut his promising baseball career short. He now self-identifies as, and lives in, a constant idea of what he could have been. And so he drinks, numbing the past and clinging to a simple life dictated by self-inflicted penance.

There is some light in his life, though. Zoë Kravitz, a paramedic, plays his love interest. But alas, even in the ’90s when this movie is set, the willingness of a woman to wait for the man to grow up and get his shit together always has a countdown, and Yvonne (Kravitz) seems to have reached near the limit of putting up with Hank’s bullshit.

So this is our setup. But everything changes when his neighbour Russ (Matt Smith) has to dash back to the UK for a family emergency and leaves Hank to look after his cat. Smith is hilarious in the vest of a mohawked, studded leather jacket-wearing Brit punk.

Despite not being particularly fond of the cat, Hank agrees to look after it. However, this isn't just any pet-sitting gig. He soon discovers a hidden key in the litter box, a seemingly innocuous item that propels him into a whirlwind of events. Suddenly, Hank finds himself entangled in a chaotic series of confrontations with various factions, each more dangerous than the last that will take him from Brooklyn to Staten Island and back. From Russian mobsters to the Hasidic Drucker brothers (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber), and even a Puerto Rican associate named Colorado (Bad Bunny), everyone is after that key, and everyone is more than willing to beat up Hank to extract information from him, who finds himself at the centre of this storm. He is forced out of his self-imposed isolation and into a violent, absurd reality. Regina King joins the cast as a hard-nosed New York detective, bringing sharp humor, grit, and authority to the unfolding drama. 

The movie doesn’t shy away from violence, Hank gets beaten, hospitalised, and barely has time to process any of it. The pacing is relentless, with shocking twists piling up day after day. At times, it feels almost too much, like Hank is expected to process trauma at superhero speed, but that frenetic energy is part of its charm.

Aronofsky’s leap from his previous, most recent work, The Whale, a tearjerker drama, to a fast-paced crime thriller is bold. The late ’90s New York setting feels gritty and alive, with cinematography that embraces the grime, neon, chaos, and energy. And maybe, even that’s exactly what links this movie to all his precedent works. He might not have a straightforward, recognisable imprint like other directors, but this grittiness, this uneasiness that he creates on screen, from which you can’t look away, and which is so very present in works like Requiem for a Dream at the beginning of his career as well as the most acclaimed Black Swan, is exactly his trademark.

Ultimately, Caught Stealing is a collision of genres: crime thriller, dark comedy, all filtered through Aronofsky’s unflinching lens. It’s fast, funny, and brutal, with a hero who initially can’t either escape nor confront the ghosts of his past. But when he emerges on the other side of this series of unfortunate events I think Hanks has finally made peace with himself and that's an happy ending as any. 

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