"Fun" and "romp" aren't words you commonly associate with director Darren Aronofsky, but that's just what he's delivered with Caught Stealing. Working with writer Charlie Heaton, who adapts his own novel here, Aronofsky has engineered a rollercoaster ride through a version of late '90s New York that is simultaneously gritty and cartoonish.
There are elements of Hitchcock's "wrong man" thrillers but in its tonally jarring presentation of NYC it falls somewhere between After Hours (a debt acknowledged by the casting of Griffin Dunne in a minor role here) and Night of the Juggler.
Austin Butler plays our hapless hero Hank, a Lower East Side barman whose potential baseball career was scuppered when he was injured in a car crash that claimed the life of his high school buddy. Now, despite having a girlfriend who looks like Zoë Kravitz (Yvonne), Hank mopes around and gets drunk while feeling sorry for himself. When his next door neighbour, a mohawk-sporting cockney punk named Russ (Matt Smith), leaves his cat with Hank while he takes a trip back to London, Hank finds himself at the centre of a criminal plot. Suddenly he's hunted by Russian, Puerto Rican and Hassidic mobsters who are convinced he's an accomplice of Russ.
In lesser hands and with a less charming leading man, Caught Stealing might play like a bad Guy Ritchie movie transposed from London to New York. But Aronofsky takes to this story like a duck to a Central Park pond, his energetic direction and Andrew Weisblum's sharp editing never allowing us to catch our breath. The manic pace is probably crucial to making Caught Stealing work, because if we were allowed time to pick apart some details it may not stand up to scrutiny.
But with the narrative moving at the pace of an elevated train, the film is unable to pause and reckon with some of its darker elements. For all its gags and stunts, this is a very violent film in which a lot of innocent lives are lost due to Hank's poor decisions. There's one shocking moment that the film almost immediately dismisses and Hank's failure to consider his role in it makes it difficult for us to care what happens to him from that point on. We end up caring more about the cat in his charge, and the movie itself seems to place more value on this moggy's life than on most of is human characters.
There's something a little tone deaf about making the hero a white American male while all the villains are either foreigners or ethnic minorities, but Butler is an undeniably engaging presence. Even if it's hard to root for Hank due to all the chaos he incites, Butler's aww shucks affability keeps us invested in his plight. The cat's pretty cute too.
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Austin Butler, Matt Smith, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, Carol Kane
