Caught Stealing: Come for the talent, stay for the ride

The most striking thing about Darren Aronofsky’s newest film, Caught Stealing, is just how normal it is. 

The American director has gone back and forth across his career between linear, grounded stories like The Wrestler and more surreal, psychological endeavors like Mother! and Black Swan. Aronofsky’s last film, 2022’s The Whale, is all hunky dory until its final moments, when it completely jumps the shark of realism, much to the (somewhat usual, for his movies) chagrin of critics.

Caught Stealing places itself fully in the former, leaving virtually nothing up to interpretation. The movie is too straightforward for its own good, straying away from Aronofsky’s past concepts of people sprouting wings, losing their minds on drugs or connecting God to the concept of pi.

The film follows Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), a former high school baseball star turned New York City bartender, following a career-ending injury. Hank’s quiet life gets upended after he agrees to cat-sit for his neighbor, Russ Binder (Matt Smith), a no-good punk who just so happens to be mediating a $4 million cross-gang deal. Little does Hank know, Russ’ cat, Bud, might just be the key to all that money and mayhem left in the wake of the unfinished deal. 

What Caught Stealing immediately feels like is Martin Scorsese’s 1985 film After Hours: an everyman getting swept up in a misadventure of strange personalities and even stranger circumstances. It’s funny but dark, uncomfortable but exciting. Both movies stand out within their respective director’s filmography as surprisingly ordinary—Scorsese’s isn’t a gangster movie and Aronofsky’s isn’t a head-trip. It makes one wonder why this kind of film isn’t being released once a month. Perhaps it’s these established, somewhat pigeonholed directors that can make this typical premise excel. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that both movies criss-cross by filming in NYC and starring Griffin Dunne. 

Caught Stealing takes its unexpected eccentricities and hard-hitting moments up a notch. In its casting, mohawked softie Matt Smith and la pistola-touting Bad Bunny are playing it mediocre against their type, yet I can’t imagine anyone else playing their roles. In its characters, the idea of two Hasids that make it home for Shabbos dinner before heading out to shoot up a Russian club might seem just too crazy to work, but somehow, in the zany criminal underworld the movie sets up, it does. When a character you expect to play a major part, because they’re played by an A-list actor, is shot dead well before the halfway point, it only grounds the story more and further defines Hank’s stakes as truly life-or-death.

Like Aronofsky, Caught Stealing is a bit of a head-scratching departure for Austin Butler. Here, he’s not a member of the Manson cult, he’s not the King of Rock and Roll, he’s not the bloodthirsty nephew of a space spice baron, he’s just… a normal guy? But while we might be accustomed to these far-out roles at this point in Butler’s career, that’s not to say he can’t play the everyman. Hank carries many moods throughout the movie to say the least, yet Butler delivers a really solid performance throughout. Whether Hank is confident, crushed or somewhere in between, Butler embodies it all. 

Caught Stealing has more going for it on paper than in its final product. Still, the film packs a punch and defies expectations many times throughout its runtime. It gets the B-movie job done and then some. Besides, sometimes we need a reminder that big-name, mid-budget films don’t have to be a thing of the past.