Austin Butler and his lovely face take a licking in “Caught Stealing,” Darren Aronofsky’s violent, hyperactive action adventure. Butler plays Hank, an East Village bartender with a heavy past who looks less attractive as nights grind into day. The problem is that Hank has a reliable tendency to serve himself too many drinks, a propensity that hours later looks a lot like addiction. It’s grim, watching him spew vomit on his building’s front door, more so because this tonally disjointed movie insists on using Hank’s mounting problems as grist for rambunctious comedy. It’s about as amusing as watching a Looney Tunes bender in hell.
Much of the movie takes place in an alternative Hades, a.k.a. the downtown New York of the late 1990s. There, when his girlfriend, Yvonne (an irritatingly wasted Zoë Kravitz), isn’t around, everything that could go wrong in Hank’s life does. His troubles begin with a punk-poseur, Russ (Matt Smith), who lives next door to him in their rundown walk-up. A lanky Brit with a ridiculous Mohawk, Russ is hurrying back home because of a family emergency and puts his cat, Bud, into Hank’s reluctant care. A hissy, longhaired beauty given to biting, Bud effectively cranks up the movie’s Rube Goldberg-like machinery by darting into Hank’s apartment. It’s an innocuous incursion that quickly leads to full-on assault on multiple fronts.
The screenplay for “Caught Stealing” was written by Charlie Huston, who adapted it from his 2004 novel of the same name. The story has clearly stoked Aronofsky’s nostalgia for the older, rougher East Village and environs, an area that is lovingly memorialized here with plenty of graffiti, mounds of garbage and a conspicuous shout-out to Kim’s Video. The halls in Hank and Russ’s building have been art-directed to peeling perfection, and there’s a sticker giving the finger to the mayor (“Giuliani is a jerk”) on a battered apartment door. There are few signs of the atmospherie-ruining gentrification that was already in effect, though; maybe I missed a shot of the Gap on St. Marks Place and Second, which by 1998 had been open for a decade.
Once the cat is out of the narrative bag, as it were, everything goes into overdrive. Two thugs with Eastern European accents and shaved heads show up looking for something and end up sending Hank to the hospital. He loses a kidney, and other characters begin losing their lives. There’s a bit of a mystery that Hank tries to solve amid his boozing, recurrent nightmares and all the mileage he racks up as he alternately flees and runs toward danger. During his adventures, he journeys into exotic lands (Brooklyn et al.) and meets Bubbe (Carol Kane), an Orthodox Jewish stereotype who serves him soup with a matzo ball the size of a cantaloupe and has two sons, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio).
The brothers turn out to be murderous villains, real monsters, as Regina King’s solicitous Detective Ramon warns Hank when his sticky situation becomes slicked with blood and he seeks help from the police. Aronofsky, however, plays Lipa and Shmully strictly for laughs, as if the very image of two Orthodox Jews with guns, bushy beards and springy sidelocks making like B-movie outlaws were inherently funny. It isn’t. The professionally seasoned Schreiber and D’Onofrio give their characters enough flickers of personality to keep them from turning into a minstrel show, so at least there’s that. (Aronofsky’s work is filled with references to Judaism, and he’s said that he was raised as culturally Jewish.)
The whole thing moves fast, despite all the complications, and looks consistently attractive; even the grime and gore are nicely lit. Butler is even more pleasant to look at, of course, whether in repose or frenetic motion, something that Aronofsky and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, capitalize on by emphasizing the actor’s physicality. At one point, in a scene at a police station after a horrific incident, the filmmakers frame a despondent Hank’s face in a tight close-up, the background softly haloing around him. Hank looks touchingly vulnerable, almost saintly, even if he often seems more of a martyr to his own bad choices. It’s an unexpectedly moving interlude in a movie that routinely descends into giddy violence.
Aronofsky has a talent for getting under his characters’ skin and deep into their heads, as he’s shown in the expressionistic passages in his better, more successful movies, like “Black Swan” and “Noah.” (He also has a mean streak, one that turned his last movie, “The Whale,” about a shut-in, into a shockingly cruel spectacle.) For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise. Then again, it doesn’t help that Aronofsky keeps tipping his hat at Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (1985), another nightmarish feature-length odyssey. The casting of that film’s star, Griffin Dunne, as Hank’s boss doesn’t help matters or Aronofsky’s movie, especially when all I wanted to do was rewatch Scorsese’s.
Caught Stealing
Rated R for florid violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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