Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), the battered lead of Darren Aronofsky’s grimy trifle “Caught Stealing,” has made two major mistakes. First, he saved a cow. Second, he agreed to watch a cat. Swerving his car around the cow and into a pole wrecked Hank’s promising professional baseball career. The cat-sitting happens after Hank moves across the country from California to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he works the closing shift at a dive bar. Before this slacker mama’s boy can crack open a can of Fancy Feast, two toughs come looking for the cat’s actual owner, his neighbor, a mohawked rocker named Russ (Matt Smith). Failing to find their real target, they beat Hank until he loses a kidney.
Then, the truly awful stuff starts. “Caught Stealing,” adapted by Charlie Huston from their novel of the same name, is a bruising bacchanal that celebrates grotty New York City in 1998, when the World Trade Center still stood tall and tech geeks were still mostly broke nerds with jobs no one understands. Duane (George Abud), the drippy programmer across the hall, keeps yelling at Hank and his steady fling, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), a party girl paramedic, that he has to wake up in the morning to build websites. They snicker like Duane couldn’t be more lame.
Thanks to the cat, Hank has blundered into a crime caper that will bring gallons of blood and vividly sketched goons to his door: Russian thugs Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Alekset (Yuri Kolokonikov), Hassidic hitmen Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio) and a Puerto Rican club owner named Colorado (Benito Martinez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny). Hank doesn’t know what these hoods want and he’s aching to get them off his back. He’s also getting hounded by NYPD Detective Roman (Regina King), a hard-nosed veteran of Alphabet City who is unconvinced that Hank is tangled up in this messy business simply because of bad luck.
Everything onscreen has been coated in graffiti, booze or bodily fluids. “Caught Stealing” would be torture to watch in Smell-O-Vision. Aronofsky clearly adores this colorful pre-millennial cesspool, even if the characters in the movie are already grumbling that Rudy Giuliani is scrubbing the life out of the place. Hank blames the mayor’s new rules when he has to stop a pack of college kids from dancing in the bar. He may just also hate Smash Mouth. The film prefers the sleazy, energetic sounds of composer Rob Simonsen and a soundtrack weighted toward the British post-punk band the Idles.
Huston has changed the characters to better suit a hyper-local vibe, reworking the book’s pair of cowboys into Schreiber and D’Onofrio’s devout Jewish brothers who detour mid-assassination to visit their mother (an adorable, Yiddish-speaking Carole Kane) on Shabbos. (The actors are so hidden under their beards that it took me half the movie to spot Schreiber’s nose.) Hank’s attempts to escape them and his other pursuers sends the camera climbing up an alleyway, whirling through a Russian wedding and vaulting across the fish tanks at an Asian grocery store, where he gets out of one dragnet by sliding under a bucket of live crabs.
It’s the kind of intimate tour of New York that usually gets called a love letter to the city, except the corners Aronofsky likes have so much grime and menace and humor that it’s more like an affectionate dirty limerick. He can’t resist adding a cockroach to the opening titles. Even in a moment of respite, when Roman takes Hank to a late-night diner for her favorite black and white cookie, the director has instructed the server to hurl the plate at her dismissively. That rude clatter is his equivalent of a sonnet.
Butler’s Hank is dog-paddling through life: a self-loathing failure just trying to keep his head above water. The former high school hero is still coasting on his charisma and only starting to realize how little he’ll have once he loses his looks and life-of-the-party bonhomie. He’s also an alcoholic — “Breakfast of champions,” he says as he chugs beer for breakfast — which adds to the strain when Yvonne warns him that a guy with one kidney needs to lay off the sauce. He doesn’t and learns the hard way that it’s tough to think when you’re hungover. As we’re with hazy Hank in every scene but one, the tone can feel lax, but editors Justin Allison and Andrew Weisblum are great at cutting together a bender.
Hank and Yvonne are hot for each other at 4 a.m. and cooler in the afternoon when they finally roll out of bed, in part because she claims she can’t get serious about someone who spends his life running. Alas, he’ll also have to spend the rest of the film running and when his apartment building feels unsafe, he doesn’t know anywhere else to go but a bar. Stumbling out of one saloon and down the sidewalk past Kim’s Video (now shuttered, R.I.P.), you can practically hear Aronofsky pleading to let him rent a movie and have a quiet night in. Meanwhile, characters keep hammering Hank about whether he’s a real killer; the actual definition becomes semantic. The truth is, Hank doesn’t think at all about who he is, or could become — only of the jock he was — which is the core of his problem.
In flashbacks, Butler glows with the promise of youth. Joy-riding with his friend Dale (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai), he humblebrags that the Major League won’t draft him any higher than 15th place. Nightmares about their car accident happen pretty much every time Hank closes his eyes, each one jolting us with the sound of a loud cracking bat. We wince whenever the film leaps from Hank’s fresh-faced past to his throbbing present, especially when he sprints and we fear he’ll pop a stitch.
Even the cat, Bud (a long-haired tortiseshell beauty named Tonic), will wind up limping on three paws and making your heart break. Don’t worry, Aronofsky only shows a few frames of that and nothing of the assault, instead letting Bud spend much of the film with his sweet head poking out of a gym bag. The cat is so impossibly patient about never getting any food or water that his breed must be half-Maine Coon, half-camel.
Aronofsky approached Huston about adapting “Caught Stealing” over a decade and a half ago, around the time he made “Black Swan.” The director’s reputation has been so tethered to ambitious (even pretentious) Oscar-caliber material that even as we get invested in whether dopey Hank can save his own neck — or, at least, the cat’s — the back of our brain is busily wondering what’s drawn him to a story that’s simply a good yarn? He must love the hectic and scuzzy New York classics that launched a generation of great filmmakers in the ’60s and ’70s. Then you think about how in 1998 — a year Aronofsky must have chosen, since the novel itself is set in 2000 — he was roughly Hank’s age and releasing his breakthrough movie “Pi,” shot on location nearby.
At a glance, his first film and his latest one feel worlds different even though they’re tramping around the same streets (and even though Aronofsky has remained loyal to his cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who gives these goings-on a rich and gritty texture). But across his career, Aronofsky has remained fixated on the burden of talent. His movies are almost always about characters at risk of squandering their potential, be they ballerinas, wrestlers, mathematicians or baseball players. Beyond guns, the biggest threat to Hank’s well-being is knowing that he nearly did something great with his life and didn’t. Meanwhile, just around the corner, young Aronofsky himself did something great — and then realized audiences expected him to keep overachieving for the rest of his career.
In that context, “Caught Stealing” feels like Aronofsky’s own pressure release. All the way through the end credits, it just wants to entertain. If this was a director’s debut film, people would praise it to the top of the Empire State Building. That it feels a tad underwhelming compared to the rest of his work is on us (and it’s still leagues better than “The Whale”). Perhaps it’s crossed Aronofsky’s mind that if audiences do dig the fluky adventures of Hank Thompson, Huston has written two more books in the series. Perhaps like Hank himself, he doesn’t want to think too far into the future.
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