Whenever Austin Butler is on screen he is usually doing a thing.
As Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, he dove so deep into the role that, off camera, it seemed like he might never stop speaking in Presley’s deep Southern drawl. As Harkonnen nepo baby Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two, he adopted a Nordic accent and psychopathic gaze. In The Bikeriders, he played an aloof, impossible to pin down greaser who had almost mythic qualities. Elsewhere, he played a QAnon-type cult leader (Eddington) and a member of the Manson family (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…).
That’s why it’s so striking that in Darren Aronofsky‘s 90s-set Caught Stealing, based on the novel by Charlie Huston, Butler plays an essentially normal dude, Hank Thompson. It’s maybe the greatest proof of his movie stardom yet.
Hank is an ex-baseball star who now works at a Lower East Side dive bar. He dates a hot EMT named Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) and drinks too much to numb the pain of a past accident, but for the most part he’s a sweet, All-American boy. He calls his mother constantly. He’s even nice to the unhoused person on his block.
That’s what makes it such a shame that Hank’s world is turned upside down after he’s asked to take care of Bud, a cat owned by his Brit-punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), who is into a very bad scene. Russ leaves town to go visit his ailing father, which means that when angry gangsters from all around the city come looking for him, Hank is the person they find.
Throughout the movie, Butler is required to be a steady force as chaos and violence swirl around him. He’s just the regular guy trying to live his regular life who gets mixed up in a bad situation, which means he’s now at the mercy of a group of excitably violent Eastern Europeans, Hasidic mobsters, and Bad Bunny sexually wielding a pistol. In one sequence, the rapper otherwise known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio flamboyantly threatens a barely clothed Butler.
Though Butler is surrounded by all these wild characters, he almost always remains the most captivating person on screen. Even in these desperate circumstances, he gives Hank an effortlessness, the kind of winning attitude one might expect from a Californian who has a preternatural athletic ability. He’s, above all, a likable guy, even though he’s dealing with buried emotional trauma and a raft of current injuries.
Caught Stealing showcases the first time in his adult career that Butler appears truly comfortable using his natural handsomeness and charisma to his advantage on screen.
When Butler was starting out he was slotted into traditional leading man roles because of his golden boy looks. On The CW’s The Carrie Diaries, for instance, he played Sebastian Kydd, the proto-Big for a young Carrie Bradshaw (AnnaSophia Robb). His main job was smoldering as the leading lady pined for him.
As Butler rose to prominence as a quote-unquote serious actor, he seemed to have a desire above all else to transform himself, masking both his personal attractiveness as well as whatever he was like in real life by sinking into his characters. It’s not that he made himself ugly—Elvis, of course, was the original teen heartthrob—but he tried to submerge himself. Butler has acknowledged recently that he’s trying to set aside his Method ways. He told Men’s Health that Laura Dern, who he met by chance, is helping him learn how to divorce himself from his more taxing parts. “She’s helping me more and more to see that you can come out the other side, and maybe bits of you have healed, and synthesized, and metabolized,” he said. “It can be therapeutic, in a way.”
This new, chiller Butler is on display in Caught Stealing. There remains an intensity to his performance—after all he’s bloodied and bruised multiple times during the action—but also a desire to invite the audience in rather than push them away. He wants the viewer to be on his and Hank’s side, and in turn is more charming than ever before. Even when he’s intoxicated it feels like an outgrowth of the Butler who grooved at a Bad Bunny concert while on an edible. The greatest movie stars are ones that combine their raw skill with a kind of ineffable glimmer. Butler has now more than proven he’s a technically strong actor, able to disappear into a role like Elvis or Feyd-Rautha. Caught Stealing makes the case that he can be just as entertaining when he’s not hiding his Austin Butler-esque qualities. It’s a good sign for his long term future as a Hollywood mainstay. He really can do it all.
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