This August has turned into New York City at the movies month, thanks first to Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest and now to Caught Stealing, an adaptation of Charlie Huston’s novel that taps into a live-wire Lower East Side vein.
Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky’s film, in theaters August 29, is a feast of metropolitan sights and sounds circa 1998, from Queens’ Shea Stadium and Coney Island’s Nathan’s Famous to downtown’s incomparable and beloved Kim’s Video, all of which galvanize this breakneck crime saga about a former baseball phenom who winds up knee-deep in illicit trouble. It doesn’t totally work, but it has a lot of fun trying.
Hank (Austin Butler) is a bartender who enjoys slinging drinks to drunkards because he can relate to them, and when he’s not downing beers, he’s got his hands wrapped around Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), a paramedic who’s falling for him. Arriving back at his apartment with Yvonne one evening, ragamuffin Hank discovers his neighbor Russ (Matt Smith)—an English punk who looks the part, complete with a mohawk and leather jacket—dropping off his cat Buddy because he has to fly back home to tend to his unwell dad.
Despite being more of a dog than a cat guy, Hank acquiesces because it pleases Yvonne. Unfortunately for him, that’s not enough to convince her that he’s Mr. Right, since he has a pesky habit of running away from, rather than confronting, his deep-rooted problems.
Exhibit A in that department is Hank’s lingering trauma regarding a car crash that killed his high-school teammate and, on the eve of the draft, ended his promising MLB career before it began. However, if he’s afraid to face his demons, Hank is no push-over, as he demonstrates when two bald Russians appear on Russ’ doorstep and he stands in their way without giving up his friend’s whereabouts.
For his bravery, Hank receives an unholy beating (highlighted by an amazing flying headbutt from one of his attackers) that puts him in the hospital and costs him a liver. This means no more drinking, which Hank—whose entire apartment is decorated with bottles—finds difficult to manage.
Nonetheless, he soon has bigger issues. The psychotic Russian thugs return to ransack Russ’ apartment, necessitating a nifty bit of fire escape acrobatics on his part. After that, he’s visited by Roman (Regina King), a narcotics officer investigating these shady individuals as well as two Hasidic “monsters,” Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio), whom she warns Hank to avoid.
All these ne’er-do-wells, it turns out, are after a boatload of cash that was part of some elaborate drug deal. The specifics of that transaction, though, are of no consequence, with Huston’s script treating it as a MacGuffin designed solely to propel the helter-skelter narrative forward.
Caught Stealing is fast, loose, and gross, full of up-close-and-personal shots of puking, overflowing toilets, and surgical staples being sadistically snipped. Aronofsky kicks his material into full-throttled gonzo gear and never downshifts; no matter the soundtrack’s hodgepodge of era-specific songs, the film has brisk, brutal hardcore energy.
It’s also distinctly familiar with the frenzied rhythms of NYC, epitomized by Hank, Russ and others being constantly harassed by web designer neighbor Duane (George Abud), who never misses an opportunity to complain about hallway noise. Following his leaden and mushy The Whale, the Brooklyn-native director is revitalized by this return to his old stomping grounds, shouting out to a bevy of landmarks and touchstones, and taking lively trips to Flushing Meadows and Brighton Beach, late-night diners and Shabbot dinners.
A rollicking Big Apple odyssey, Caught Stealing is like a more violent variation on Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and Aronofsky underlines that connection by casting its star Griffin Dunne as Hank’s watering hole boss Paul. The film’s outrageous twists, however, don’t completely cohere.
Huston’s tale is so feverish that Hank is bounced around as if inside a pinball machine, and its pace interferes with the emotional impact of an early tragedy that sends the protagonist into overdrive and is followed by additional fights, shootouts, and fatalities. Aronofsky’s approach is almost too cartoonish, undercutting genuine engagement with the superficial action.
That’s too bad, because Butler is perfect as the harried athlete, who wakes from sleep screaming courtesy of his PTSD nightmares, habitually calls his mom to talk about his beloved San Francisco Giants—the object of his unceasing affection, especially since they’re competing for a Wild Card spot—and endures one brutal injury and indignity after another.
Along his madcap journey, Hank crosses paths with volatile club owner Colorado (Bad Bunny) and nice Jewish mother Bubbe (Carol Kane), both of whom add additional color to this comic book-y affair. Alas, Caught Stealing always seems one step away from true inspiration, its mayhem incapable of providing a gut-busting laugh or jaw-dropping shock.
Less exhilarating than pleasantly diverting, it can’t match the narcotized turbulence of the Safdie Brothers’ kindred Good Time. Yet ironically, it benefits from Aronofsky’s relatively straightforward direction; aside from the recurring slow-motion vision of a car wrapping itself around a pole, the filmmaker keeps things streamlined and scuzzy without unnecessary aesthetic embellishments.
As an ensemble crime thriller that prizes chaotic attitude and electricity above all else, Caught Stealing faithfully recalls the genre movies of its story’s chosen era, and Butler gets better as his face gets bruised and his body battered.
Putting Hank’s baserunning skills to good use during a chase through a grocery store and busy traffic, and showing off his sweet swing to more than one opponent, the actor makes for a magnetic mess, and in one early scene, his chemistry with Kravitz is so strong that it’s a shame the two don’t get additional opportunities to develop their characters’ smoldering rapport.
With grungy flair, he keeps the proceedings on track even when creaky clichés (King’s cop) and clunky caricatures (Schreiber and D’Onofrio’s orthodox gangsters) threaten to derail it.
Caught Stealing opens with an anonymous baserunner stealing home but Aronofsky’s latest is more akin to a solid ground-rule double. Paired with the material’s gung-ho ethos, Butler’s charisma is enough to make this whiplash underworld affair a moderately satisfying late-summer offering, not to mention the latest—and, at its finest, loopiest—cinematic love letter to the City That Never Sleeps.
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