The new crime comedy Caught Stealing unfolds in the year 1998, traveling across a distinctly grungy New York City—all dingy subway platforms and drab Chinatown apartments. The time frame differs just slightly from that of the novel it’s based on, which is set in 2000. I can think of only one reason the director, Darren Aronofsky, might have decided to make this tweak: The film shares its time and place with his debut feature, Pi, which premiered that same year. The micro-budget production, which follows a paranoid mathematician searching for order in the chaos of numbers, established Aronofsky as a filmmaker eager to push his vision of the city as at once shabby and gorgeous.
That Caught Stealing echoes the scruffy, anything-goes atmosphere of Aronofsky’s earliest work gives it a sense of frenzied nostalgia. But the film itself offers few signs of the times—other than the epic collapse of that year’s New York Mets in the playoff race, which is rudely shown in the background. The story is, rather, a timeless tale of mistaken identity: Austin Butler stars as a bartender chased around town by seemingly every member of the city’s criminal underworld, for reasons unbeknownst to him. Aronofsky has, since the grittiness of Pi and Requiem for a Dream, flitted with alacrity from genre to genre, trying his hand at biblical epics (Noah) and claustrophobic dramas (The Whale). But Caught Stealing’s pitch-black, pulpy mode reveals the drawbacks of prioritizing style over all else.
The dog days of summer—a period that typically offers up stale or forgettable fare—do need more films like the kind Aronofsky has tried to make: a sexy, gritty thriller for grown-ups, starring a bunch of good-looking stars. Yet Caught Stealing recalls, at best, a disposable Blockbuster rental from the era in which it’s set. Aronofsky has done a great job summoning a bygone Lower Manhattan—the almost-derelict bars, crummy walk-ups, and greasy diners of yesteryear. (At one point, there’s even a prominent shot of a black-and-white cookie, a city staple.) Where Aronofosky is less successful, however, is making the action as alluring as its romantic backdrop.
Butler plays Hank Thompson, who was on his way to becoming a star ballplayer for his beloved San Francisco Giants before a car crash ended his chances. Now his primary interests include flirting with his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz); running his fingers through his long, stringy blond hair; and partying hard. Hank is supposedly living at the bottom of a bottle, struggling to stay afloat after his athletic dreams were dashed, but Butler (a very talented performer) is simply too charming and put together to sell that notion. When he accidentally becomes responsible for cleaning up a drug dealer’s mess, Hank is curiously unperturbed, greeting violent threats, death, and destruction with little more than a wan sigh.
Hank is sucked into the disarray by his neighbor, a mohawked ne’er-do-well British punk named Russ (Matt Smith) who asks Hank to feed his cat for a few days while he makes a trip to London. Soon enough, all sorts of strangers come calling in search of a key Russ left behind—including aggressive Russian mobsters, two gun-toting Hasidim (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber), a hard-bitten NYPD detective (Regina King), and a gangster named Colorado (Bad Bunny). None of these characters rises above the most cartoonish outlines, despite the overall capacity of their performers. I did appreciate Aronofsky throwing in additional pieces of stunt casting that paid homage to Lower Manhattan–set films of decades past. The actor Carol Kane appears for one big scene; she starred in the remarkable Hester Street, as a recent immigrant struggling to assimilate at the turn of the 20th century. There’s also a worthy part for Griffin Dunne, who led Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece After Hours—another panicked tale of New Yorker paranoia.
But referencing Scorsese, the forever king of the New York crime movie, is a risk Caught Stealing probably shouldn’t have taken. I spent much of the running time reminiscing on just how thoughtful and composed the best examples of this genre can be, such as the classics New Jack City and King of New York and the more recent Good Time—films that found pathos in the lives of drug lords and petty criminals. Caught Stealing is far more ragged around the edges; its characters’ only motivations are looking for money and hoping to survive, other than the saintly, underwritten Yvonne. Hank is presented a different problem: He’s handed a beating early that damages his kidneys, making it unwise for him to drink, yet every time he swigs a beer after that, there’s still no sense of stakes—Butler is too implacably pretty a screen presence to ever seem in genuine danger.
I do not know what to make of Aronofsky’s career of late. Caught Stealing is better than the portentous and heavy-handed The Whale, but both films have the vibe of a visually competent director intent on creating striking images. With The Whale, Aronofsky portrayed his extremely overweight protagonist like a skyscraper-size monster, using the limitations of the character’s cramped-apartment setting as a sort of directorial challenge. In Caught Stealing, Aronofsky drops the viewer into an older New York as another artistic exercise, but renders it as a playground for bloody and one-dimensional silliness. His skill as a cinematic storyteller is on display—I just missed the narrative depth and danger that used to come with the elegant shots.
