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Darren Aronofsky has always had a peculiar sense of humor, though it rarely shows itself as comedy. In Requiem for a Dream, it was gallows humor drowned in heroin despair. In Black Swan, it arrived as camp masquerading as high art. In Mother! it roared as an operatic prank disguised as scripture. Now, with Caught Stealing, Aronofsky’s adaptation of Charlie Huston’s 2004 crime novel, he veers headlong into screwball sadism: a film equal parts bruising action odyssey and grotesque cartoon, splattered across the grimy backdrop of late-1990s New York.
The premise is deceptively small. Hank (Austin Butler), a washed-up former baseball star turned alcoholic bartender, inherits the care of a neighbor’s cat and thereby inherits a spiral of violence that roars outward in expanding concentric circles. Matt Smith plays Russ, the mohawked Brit who foists the feline on Hank before skipping town; Russians soon descend in search of money, leaving Hank battered, short one kidney, and entangled with far darker forces. These include Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber as Orthodox Jewish gangsters, Carol Kane as their soup-making matriarch, and Regina King as a police officer whose sharp instincts cut more cleanly than the film’s frequent knives.
It is an odyssey of misfortune: every attempt at refuge leads Hank further into danger. Aronofsky, perhaps emboldened after the funereal seriousness of The Whale, leans into slapstick brutality. Limbs shatter, blood spurts, and car crashes unfold like slapdash ballets. There is something Looney Tunes about it all, except the anvil that falls on Hank’s head is existential shame, and the dynamite sticks are alcoholism and regret.
Butler’s bruised saint
Butler, all bruises and shadowed eyes, carries the film with a reluctant magnetism. In early scenes, his hands tremble around whiskey glasses; by mid-film, they’re trembling over baseball bats and pistols. Hank’s past — a career derailed in disgrace, glimpsed through nightmare flashbacks — lingers like a phantom injury. His self-destructive tendencies aren’t softened for sympathy; Aronofsky and Butler conspire to make his downward spiral both appalling and comic. When Hank vomits on his own building’s front stoop, the camera lingers uncomfortably long, as though daring us to laugh before recoiling.
Aronofsky has always been fascinated by martyrs of their own bad choices, and Hank is a particularly American one. His greatest glory, the “one hell of a swing” that astonishes a bystander when he picks up a bat late in the film, is also his deepest wound. Butler plays him not as a fallen hero but as a man allergic to dignity, quick to lie about his past (he denies ever playing professional ball when confronted by King’s detective) and quicker to drink it away. If Aronofsky never quite cracks Hank’s inner life, Butler compensates with sheer physical vulnerability: slumped shoulders, eyes ringed in sweat, a body that seems to shrink as the film goes on.
New York in decay
The film’s setting is itself a character: a lovingly art-directed East Village on the cusp of gentrification, preserved in graffiti, garbage bags, and answering-machine messages. Aronofsky, a native New Yorker, romanticizes not the city’s glamour but its grime. Pay phones and flip-top cell phones reappear like relics; Jerry Springer flickers on televisions; Smash Mouth plays on the jukebox. There’s even a sticker declaring “Giuliani is a jerk” on a battered apartment door. The film’s nostalgia is tactile but selective. This New York is less historical record than fever dream — a purgatorial playground where Hank’s suffering can acquire mythic, if absurd, dimensions.
The comparison most critics will make, and Aronofsky himself courts, is to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Both films chart one man’s chaotic night through a labyrinth of menace and absurdity. Griffin Dunne, the star of After Hours, even appears here as Hank’s bar manager, an act of homage that borders on distraction. Yet where Scorsese’s film simmered with Kafkaesque paranoia, Caught Stealing substitutes hyperactive sadism. Its villains are grotesques: Russ with his cartoon mohawk, the Hasidic brothers wielding Uzis like vaudeville props, even the cat itself — a hissing Rube Goldberg trigger for disaster.
The problem of tone
This cartoonishness is the film’s chief thrill and its chief liability. Aronofsky’s giddy violence often straddles the line between mischief and malice, but too often, the joke curdles. A matzo ball the size of a cantaloupe, served by Kane’s Bubbe, may earn a laugh, but paired with her sons’ murderous brutality, the humor dips into caricature. Jewish imagery has long haunted Aronofsky’s work, but here it feels more like provocation than insight.
Similarly, the treatment of Hank’s alcoholism veers erratically between pathos and farce. In one scene, he staggers drunkenly through the streets, pathetic and pitiable; in the next, he is a slapstick punching bag, bouncing from one calamity to another. The tonal whiplash keeps the film unpredictable, but it also prevents Hank’s suffering from cutting as deeply as it should.
Aronofsky has proven himself capable of psychological immersion — think of the fevered subjectivity of Black Swan or the apocalyptic fervor of Mother! — but here, he remains at a curious remove. We watch Hank endure, but rarely feel trapped in his headspace. The violence shocks, the set pieces dazzle, but the soul remains curiously intact, untouched.
A swing and a miss — or a base hit?
And yet, the film is never dull. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography makes even the gore glow, framing Hank in tight, almost saintly close-ups before flinging him back into chaos. The editing pulses with nervous energy, as though the film itself has downed too many shots. And Aronofsky’s staging of action — messy, chaotic, but always legible — restores some of the confrontational extravagance of his early work. If The Whale was a solemn sermon, Caught Stealing is a drunken shout from a barstool, equal parts confession and dare.
Does it cohere? Not entirely. The violence is too gleeful, the comedy too cruel, the nostalgia too curated. But Aronofsky’s willingness to risk incoherence feels bracing. In a cinematic landscape where crime thrillers too often smooth their edges into streaming fodder, Caught Stealing insists on being jagged, ugly, alive.
Near the film’s end, Hank finally swings a bat again, and the crack of contact echoes like a memory of lost glory. A small crowd gathers, awed, as though they’ve glimpsed a ghost of what might have been. That’s the film in miniature: a bruised man taking one last wild swing, too late for triumph, but not too late for spectacle.
Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing may not be a home run, but it’s certainly not a strikeout either. It is, appropriately, a stolen base — messy, desperate, fueled by survival instinct and dumb luck. Some viewers will see only the clumsy slide into chaos; others will see the daring dash itself. Either way, it’s a play worth watching.
