Austin Butler in Darren Aronofsky’s Caper

You wouldn’t expect Darren Aronofsky to make a slick crime movie, but that’s just what this entertaining, twisty and ultimately bloody caper is. Driven by Austin Butler‘s magnetism and chiseled supporting turns from a gaggle of top-flight actors, Caught Stealing is the most overtly commercial film Aronofsky has ever made. That may not sound like much next to the dark psychology of Black Swan, arguably his best film. But even his most mainstream efforts, like The Whale, aren’t nearly as glossy and sleek as this, and he pulls it of beautifully.

Butler plays Hank, once a talented high-school baseball player whose realistic hopes of going pro were ended by an injury. Now he is aimless and tending bar in a grungy dive on New York’s Lower East Side in 1998, when gentrification hadn’t entirely taken hold. The atmosphere is gritty and specific, from the opening credits, displayed as tiles on the crumbling subway walls, to the mounds of garbage on the street to the stickers on the door of Hank’s neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), that say “Giuliani is a jerk” and “Die Yuppie Scum.”

Russ looks like a caricature of a British punk, with a wild blond Mohawk and a studded leather jacket, but the joke quickly gives way to action when Russ leaves his cat with Hank while he heads back to England. Soon Russian thugs are beating up Hank in his hallway, looking for Russ and the drug money he has hidden and that Hank knows nothing about. With his wide-eyed look, Butler is perfectly cast as the innocent who has to call on his wits and MacGyver his way out of a mess.

Zoë Kravitz plays Hank’s girlfriend, Yvonne, whose skills as a paramedic come in handy. Yvonne seems in the film mostly to have hot sex with Hank at the start, then to disappear once she has served her purpose in the plot. Most of the supporting characters come and go that way, a device that turns out to be a feature not a bug. The plot resembles a shaggy-dog story that seems to meander off in unexpected directions, even while the narrative stays focused on Hank running for his life, pursued by thugs.

Among the sharp supporting cast, Regina King plays the detective Hank calls for help and Bad Bunny (billed by his real name, Benito Martinez Ocasio) plays the dapper boss of the Russians. Griffin Dunne plays Paul, the owner of the bar where Hank works. He’s another visual joke, looking like an aging biker with a long gray ponytail and sleeveless leather vest.

Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio play the least typical crime characters, Lipa and Shmully, Hasidic brothers who may be the most lethal of the killers to cross Hank’s path. D’Onofrio gets their best line, when he suggests someone else has to drive a getaway car. “I’m in enough trouble with Hashem without driving on Shabbos,” he says. Carol Kane is their Bubbe. Even as they all move in and out of the film and back again, the screenplay by Charlie Huston, based on their 2004 novel, keeps things moving and the editing adds momentum to every scene.  

There is definitely a current of Aronofsky’s typical darkness in the number of bloody shootouts and all the corpses strewn around, with innocent bystanders as well as villains casually bumped off. And Hank has his personal demons. He has nightmares, which we see as flashbacks, of the car crash that caused his injury while he was recklessly driving. Butler brings depth to those scenes, his face expressing pain beyond what the screenplay gives him, and Aronofsky has the good sense to keep the camera close on him in those moments. But mostly Butler veers toward action as Hank has to outrun various thugs, whether hanging from a window ledge or sliding under a vendor’s food cart as if he were heading into home base.

Despite all the bloody violence, there is a buoyant feel to the film. Matthew Libatique, Aronofsky’s constant and brilliant cinematographer, makes the city glittery bright outside and the look is vibrant even in the dingy bar. Caught Stealing is an anomaly, a dark soap bubble of an entertainment. And that weirdness makes this unlikely film sparkle.