Hank (Austin Butler) is floating through life since his dreams of going to the majors in Baseball were squashed after surviving a career ending car accident.  Living in New York City, he works nights at a dive bar with little intention or motivation to find anything else since it gives him easy access to booze which helps him drown of his girlfriend, Yvonne’s (Zoë Kravitz), concerns about his drinking.  When he bumps into his neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), who is in a rush to catch a plane back to the UK for his father’s funeral, Hank unwittingly accepts the duty of cat sitting Bud in Russ’ absence.  What started as a simple task quickly pulls Hank into the criminal underworld when Russian mobsters come to collect their due from Russ. 

Darren Aronofsky makes his most commercial friendly film to date with Caught Stealing, an adaptation of Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel of the same name with Huston also providing the script for the 107 minute frantic urban thriller.  Released by Sony in the late slumps of August across the Labor Day frame, the film seems almost abandoned by the studio despite the buzzy cast.  While its box office performance may suffer even through it breached almost 3,500 screens, the title feels primed for its eventual Netflix debut where its old school programmer feel will be a major asset and with Matthew Libatique‘s cinematic eye behind the camera, it will not have the same slides-off-the-retinas gloss that Netflix originals – and, to be fair, most direct-to-streaming titles – tend to suffer. As proven time and time again, titles that hit Netflix after a theatrical rollout tend to out perform, so even if viewing this release through a cynical lens, it still proves that there is something to be said about the allure of big screen and how the cinema fits into the streaming era. 

What starts out as a simple enough conceit quickly breaks open into a dog-eat-dog fray across a grimy, late 1990s set New York City.  To navigate the many twists and turns of the narrative, audiences have Butler as their guide in one of his first true leading roles and tests as an actor.  Sure, he had the title role in Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis (2022) that catapulted him into stardom, but Hank is the first major role for the actor where he must craft the character in conjunction with his director and not have archival footage to inform and inspire the performance.  The result? Butler is serviceable in the role and does what the script asks of him never standing out as a poor fit, but in a case of chicken or the egg, it may not have been the right role for this breakout as he does not own it nearly as much as he has been proven to do in his past supporting roles.  Importantly, though, Butler is never swallowed by the narrative and is unafraid to get down and dirty when the script requires him to. 

While that can be a large ask of an actor in an Aronofsky film that often sees those leading characters broken through narrative and ironic torture, Butler gets off easy as Caught Stealing does not have that same cynical streak that we have come to expect from one of the most provocative nihilists working in film today.  The film feels like a distant cousin of Quinten Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) in its narrative scope, the cadence of Andrew Weisblum‘s edit, and the style of characters which inhabit the world of the film, but the hooks in Caught Stealing are far easier to wriggle off of than Tarantino’s first magnum opus.  Weisblum keeps the story moving quickly so that we are never bored, but we are seldom deeply engaged in the film, either.  Without the usual thorny stakes present in Aronofsky’s work as he thoroughly tests his leading characters beyond their breaking point, we never feel any true danger for Hank; something compounded by the coda of the film which further works to gently cradle our hero.  Few would volunteer to take his place, and he certainly does suffer some harrowing events across the few days we spend with him, but that gut punch lands softly on audiences, losing its momentum somewhere in the space between the screen and the seats and it is hard to tell if it is Aronofsky or Huston who is playing soft ball. 

The frantic pace of the film keeps our minds from staying, but what keeps our hearts invested in the story beyond the simple puppy-dog quality of Hank is the menagerie of riotous characters that bumble and bustle their way through the underbelly of New York City.  It is not a classy or elegant affair when we are with the various factions of the mob be it Russian (Yuri Kolokolnikov, Nikita Kukushkin), Latin (Bad Bunny), or Jewish (Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio), and the police, with an investigation headed by the steely Det. Elise Roman (Regina King) seemingly more annoyed that she has been pulled into an investigation than anything else, her character and investigation style muddy the waters of the narrative as we are placing these characters’ motivations on the chart as to how they all relate and counteract with each other.  Landing just a touch too softly to be a true farce, the ensemble of Caught Stealing is doing their best to navigate an unwieldly script that has slipped loose from the hands of its director.  The result is a collection of sequences all ranging from good to great, but with a fraying throughline, little in the film builds upon itself in a satisfying way.  The backstabbing, deceit, and revelations of secret alliances do not land with the same narrative catharsis as they should simply because scope of the film is so wide that it hardly seems like it all belongs together.   

That being said, the film is in no way a miniseries crammed into feature length as it very well could have been had it bypassed theatres.  Once Aronofsky gets going, he does not pump the brakes even if that means it gets a bit hairy as he whips around the narrative turns to tackle another element of the convoluted plot.  The act breaks blur together in the frenzy, aided by the simple-at-its-core story, yet the film still lacks the cohesion that would make it a truly thrilling episode.  As mentioned, it will thrive when it lands on Netflix, but for those seeking that same poison dart which Aronofsky has spent his career perfecting, they will find this way too soft in its delivery leaving only a mild sting that quickly subsides.  Through and through, the film goes to lengths to prove that Hank is not a killer, and in the end he never has to truly reckon with that fact that his moral compass will not let him stray from his path and what that means as he finds himself in a world that will cut through him if he is but standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He is a changed man in the end, sure, in the most simplistic turns, but Aronofsky has not baptized Hank with scorching flame as he has been apt to do in his more monolithic works; perhaps the latest example of art falling victim to commerce in a battle that ultimately has no winners.