Love you. Go Giants.

CAUGHT STEALING

2025

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Written by Charlie Huston (based on the novel by Huston)

Spoilers: moderate

The speculation that I'd like to make with Caught Stealing—Darren Aronofsky's tenth film and by just some huge margin the oddest one out*—is that Aronofsky,  getting into his late middle age, must be feeling certain regrets, and sure, we all have those; but the one that's presently motivated this guy to make a whole movie is apparently just the fact that, after he secured his filmmaking career with Pi in 1999, he spent just a little too long in his particular Aronofsky niche to do a movie like this, even though he naturally always wanted to.  Aronofsky got into filmmaking a few years later than his peers, so he had to make up some lost time and focus on what was most important to him, but it's a pretty safe bet that, just like everybody else who came up during the 1990s, he was smitten with what Quentin Tarantino and Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie were doing on their side of that decade's indie cinema, building what amounted to an entire genre out of cool, weird Gen Xers doing crimes, while there Aronofsky was, stuck on his side of indie cinema, being a nerd and pursuing his Cronenbergian/Lynchian/Polanskian psychohorrory sort of deal.  In a sense, he did try his hand at the former mode for his very next film: Requiem For a Dream is, I suppose, a cool movie, about criminals.  But I don't think anybody's ever once mistaken it for Trainspotting, even when their respective loglines are practically identical ("man, are these four people addicted to these fuckin' drugs, or what?"), and Aronofsky's formally-superb albeit kind-of-screechy PSA is, quite clearly, not the same thing.  Maybe Aronofsky realized his fellows across the way were all, you know, funny—maybe even more to the point, their filmmaking personalities were lively—and that he was not funny, and his energy, though undeniable, was of a different kind, so he simply had to content himself with making his towering masterpiece, The Fountain, which is one of the best movies of the 21st century while being extremely not funny, and emphatically soaked through with the inevitability of death, and, despite roots planted firmly in the same movement that produced stupid criminal movies, as far away from that post-Tarantino stereotype of 90s indie cinema as one could imagine.  Nevertheless, the desire must have remained, and then something happened: over time, in secret and under close guard, Aronofsky developed a sense of humor.

Perhaps the director realized that making movies where people do things like drilling holes in their heads so they don't have to do arithmetic anymore can have its amusing side, and some real cracks did start to show in his humorlessness—Black Swan, I've publicly avowed, has comedy, though scabrousness is still its dominant form—but unless The Whale is somehow hilarious in a way no one's bothered to mention to me, this finds Aronofsky making a movie that, for the first time, is a comedy, and with it I surmise that he's been able to scratch that twenty-six year itch.  It diligently checks the boxes: a curated soundtrack that, not at all unlike a 90s movie, somehow does not contain the song the fucking movie is named after, but does involve vintage styles that've been revived and replicated by post-punk act The Idles, a band that was actually formed in 2009 and who therefore seem to exist lost in time when they're explicitly mentioned in dialogue (though my very favorite song here, and my favorite use of a song, is a thematically-laden Scorpions standard from a flashback to the 80s); likewise, it keeps wandering back over to discussions of pop cultural fandom, albeit a fandom substantially to the side of the 90s' metacelebrations of the dorky and obscure, with the San Francisco Giants' 1998 season and apparent insurgency (they came in second place in the National League West Division to the Cubs) almost rising to the level of a structuring device, and even winding up of crucial import to a chase sequence; almost needless to say, given its genre, this movie involves ethnically-organized crime, but while interested in the fractious polyglot of urban life, it still mixes things up significantly in this regard, for the sake of humor and ethnological study alike; oh, and yeah, it has a fairly involved monologue about a Goddamn food item, which is what you'd call "a tell."

Even so, it's still very much Darren Aronofsky's post-Tarantino crime comedy, and not too amenable to being pinned down as a knock-off of any specific purveyor of that genre—somehow, despite its circumstances not obviously seeming to support it, it even manages to be a subtly magisterial inventory of Aronofsky's own past career, with a considerable number of thematic connections within his filmography, most meaningfully in how it threads in an addiction drama, though I think the spectacularly blatant one is that a career that kicked itself off with clutch of evil Hasidim now brings us back full circle, to some even eviler Hasidim, and ultimately a pretty contemptuous treatment of the convention of Shabbos—but, anyway, it might be the single most astute "90s nostalgia throwback" movie that anybody's made so far, thrumming with that peculiar premillennial energy that's not quite nihilism, but only able to beat the nihilism back with absurdity.  Hence the splendid, almost impossibly-controlled atonality of it: it's a movie where, for example, I was laughing pretty hard at how incredibly goofy a particularly-bedraggled character was starting to look, then that character immediately died, and that wasn't funny at all.  And while in some other movie you might be able to dig a "spoiler" out of that, this is, after all, a movie where proximity to its hero, Henry "Hank" Thompson (Austin Butler), is not any kind of healthy place to be in.

A few years back, or maybe more than a few now, Hank was set to become a baseball star, but an injury—not, as it happens, sustained on the field—took that dream and stamped on it, so when we catch up with him on the end of a bluntly period-setting image (the Twin Towers, and I mean, thank you, it's been a quarter fucking century), we find that he's marched himself across the entire country from California to the Lower East Side, where he ekes out a living amidst the late 20th century filth as a bartender, a job that dovetails well with what we quickly understand is a taste for booze and not too long afterward resolves itself into some downright cartoonish alcoholism.  The brightest light in his dim existence is undeniably his might-be-could-be girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz), and he's made something like a life for himself, with friends and neighbors such as Russ (Matt Smith, ridiculous), a punk who has refused to advance even marginally from about the year 1981, and who presently foists a chore on Hank, the relatively simple task of looking after his cat (Tonic the Cat, notable as a cat you've likely seen in several movies by this point, and is so implausibly well-behaved you've probably assumed he was CGI) while Russ heads temporarily back to Britain.  Unfortunately, with the cat comes trouble, in the form of Russ's own associates, a pair of Russian mobsters (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushin) who seem to work for a Puerto Rican mobster (Benito Martinez Ocasio) and seem to be at odds with a pair of Jewish mobsters (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio), and all of whom are being chased by a deeply unhelpful and antagonistic narcotics detective (Regina King).  The upshot is that the Russians, after something that Russ had hidden from them, work their frustration out on Hank so hard that he loses a damn kidney; what they realize the next time their paths cross is that Hank actually has what they're looking for, a certain key, which came with the cat.  (It is also like the 90s film, Men In Black.**)  The challenge is that Hank doesn't remember exactly where he put the key—in case you doubt how cartoonish his alcoholism is, Hank's response to losing that kidney was to get blackout drunk within 72 and possibly only 48 hours of doing so—but whether he remembers or not, he's gotten himself into some real shit.

There is no good purpose to going through what forms that shit takes here, because the fun is in the textures of the experience; but Caught Stealing is stupendously headlong and breathless, patient enough to establish a baseline vibe and its characters as figures worth investing in, but once it starts, it's virtually constant forward momentum.  This, of course, is a pretty "Aronofsky" thing to be, but damn: at a certain juncture, I came perilously close to taking a bathroom break because the movie was signaling "it's time for a decompressing dialogue scene now," whereupon someone just up and fucking died (not the one I already mentioned, either), and we get thrown right back into the plot's cataract flow.  (The movie even plays this particular trick twice.  There's literally only one point where things actually slow down for the kind of exposition dump that's natural for the plot and that's helpful, but not necessary, for the viewer—and so, as a public service to those who, like me, enjoy their soda pop, it's immediately after Hank hits Russ in the head with that baseball bat.  And you still ought to be quick about it.)  It really is a superb little thriller, and in its pursuit it finds Aronofsky stepping surprisingly far out of his aesthetic box, probably the most he's done so since Noah—which was at least still shot on film, The Whale being Aronofsky's first and before this only foray into full digital cinematography, though I'm pretty certain he didn't want you to be consciously aware of that there.  And that somewhat remains the case here: there's a fuzzy grittiness that's going for that "16mm" look, and is generally successful at it, and there are whole sequences where I think you could trick somebody into thinking it actually was a movie made in 1998, though I imagine the title card saying "1998" would probably be a giveaway, as might the occasional over-aware line of dialogue.  (There's a brief exchange about gentrification and Giuliani, for instance, that I really don't believe would take that form in a 1998 film; and there's the occasional verbiage, like the word "own it" used in the sense of accountability for one's actions, or the term "fucktard" which I'm pretty certain comes from the Internet of the early 21st century, that feel very faintly anachronistic to my ears.)

But not at all rarely, there'll come another gesture that'll somehow be simultaneously quiet and loud, where your unfrozen Gen X viewer will need to ask, "wait a minute, did you attach that 16mm camera to a fucking drone so we could watch Austin Butler clamber across fire escapes?" (and you'll have ask that viewer, "how the hell do you know what a drone is, you charlatan?"), where it wallops you with its nature as a film manufactured in 2025, which I mean, unusually enough, as a compliment: it's shockingly elegant as a matter of thrillmaking (even just dramaturgical!) craft, often just kind of flawlessly constructed as a matter of Andrew Weisblum's editing and Aronofsky's storytelling, in productive tension with a movie about living in the gutter and frankly a bit strange in its sleekness for a director who spent a big part of the middle of his career just having Matthew Libatique (still Aronofsky's main man) shoulder-mount a barely-stabilized camera and diligently follow the back of some actor's Goddamn head.  It's not always showing off with how tight and lithe yet classical it is, but it's awfully good at using compositional space and using its set features for framing; Libatique even makes a decent run at redeeming contemporary fads like rampant underlighting and shallow focus close-ups, though in the former's case (even with a really cool, "hey, we can still do that? is it legal?" recourse to a throwback "blue fake dark" rather than our 21st century's "completely-imparsable real dark"), it does interact with a mildly-freakish color grade that is, sometimes, obnoxiously negligent about letting skintones (well, King survives it and Kravitz mostly does) get weirdly pink and feverish, which, in conjunction with that filmic patina sometimes getting cloudier and milkier than it ought, is by some degree my biggest problem with the movie.

As for how this does "close-ups in shallow focus" well, I suppose that's just a function of having the most exciting new movie star of the 2020s square in the middle of things, and I'm ecstatic to find that my love for Butler, who's been bouncing around giving (usually still very vital) secondary performances since his big breakout in 2022's Elvis, has been vindicated in what amounts to only his second star turn: there are plenty of different reasons Caught Stealing works, yes—including a uniformly terrific supporting cast starting with Kravitz as an indispensably grounding force, and not stopping till it's gone through its whole mutually-antagonistic ensemble of funny/terrifying New York oddballs—but Butler is the reason.  There's the foundational stuff—Butler's basic screen presence, which is pretty damn necessary considering that almost literally no scene ever leaves his presence, on behalf of the nice guy justifiably haunted by his past, that still doesn't actually deny us access to all the numerous blasts of vicarious fun, responsible and irresponsible alike, we get to have through him, from as thrillery as his slow tempering into a more active master of his own fate to as why-the-hell-not as a drunken-ass singalong to Meredith Brooks's "Bitch"—but an absolutely huge amount of that 90s movie tonal alchemy that I mentioned, that Aronofsky's taking such full advantage of, only happens because Butler is essentially playing the lead of two entirely different movies simultaneously and doing each of their extremely distinct tones so well.  In the first, he's the fool thrown into a zany caper that incidentally involves a great deal of violence and death but is defined, principally, by its 90s-chatty antagonists and the act of shepherding a cat.  In the second, he's a psychologically-broken fuck-up who's already been punishing himself for his sins but only as a way of avoiding understanding them, now confronted with what feels like God's own hatred, subjected to a contrived gauntlet of horror where he's continually asked why he deserves to continue to exist when his existence does exactly nothing but cause everybody he cares about pain.

Again, both of these movies are happening at the exact same time, and Butler doesn't falter, always finding the exact right mode to play Hank as a human person undergoing real experiences, who's also an almost fabulistic figure of disproportionate cosmic punishment, but who's also the straightman for and occasional participant in a swear-word-loaded 90s comedy.  He's making frequent and extreme gear shifts between the two (and, as implied, even three) modes there, between "legitimately harrowing drama" and "bloodstained frivolity," and sometimes he's doing this in harmony with his co-stars, and at least as often he's doing this in complete stark contrast to them, so that instead of comic they feel like outrageous ghouls, though at any opportune moment he's equally willing to give the movie permission to shift right back into woolly comedy again without degrading the ugly tragedies that remain akin to to open wounds.  (He also has an open wound, which he mostly does remember, but the outlandish movie-movie ludicrousness of the set-up is perhaps one way it gives us in the audience permission to have fun.)

It winds up in a very curious place for Aronofsky—a movie that certainly wants you to think of it as an insubstantial good time in terms of its genre trappings, and fixed upon what seems like a fairly un-Aronofskian protagonist, given that the filmmaker's favored archetype is a promethean asshole obsessed to the point of madness with whatever they're obsessed with, while in Butler's Hank we have a plebeian nobody not obviously "obsessed" with or even interested in anything, besides baseball, a game he can only watch, but then, that's it right there, an Aronofsky hero whose obsession is "doing nothing," either out of penance, or, just as likely, childish bitterness.  (Hell, at bottom, the 90s movie it might resemble the most might be Clerks.)  Now, there's a few problems with this, maybe: whatever's going on in the Charlie Huston novel this is based on (which has two sequels and I just don't know you'd even begin to generate a sequel from this film), Aronofsky's Caught Stealing is kind of stickily attached to its protagonist as the only person who emotionally matters within its fictional construct, which is not really any serious crime (it's one of the things fictional constructs are for), and frankly it ought to be expected anyway, given that even if this is a change of pace for Aronofsky, this has always been the single most invariable aspect of his filmmaking; it's also a little too neat and symmetrical regarding Hank's sudden discovery that his choices have actually mattered and continue to do so, which is certainly also "of Aronofsky," though it's a bit more aggravating amidst the accoutrements of a movement that was in love with grimy messiness as much as a matter of narrative as aesthetics.  These are real caveats, as are the excesses of Libatique's photography.  But Goddamn it, it's got the verve to spare.

Score: 10/10

*Well, I somehow still haven't seen The Whale—an error to be corrected sooner rather than later, I hope—but I think the point stands.

**You know, I'm being a dipshit, but this isn't even the only very salient similarity.  There are, in fact, at least three.