The title refers to Lower East Side bartender Hank Thompson’s (Austin Butler) being a one-time highly regarded baseball prospect before a high-speed one-car crash ended his dreams of playing in the show, but also references Aronofsky himself, essentially making it clear he means “Caught Stealing” as pastiche. The emergent underworld odyssey of Hank nods to Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” rendered explicit in that movie’s star Griffin Dunne appearing in “Caught Stealing” as Hank’s boss, and the late 90s setting evokes not just Quentin Tarantino but so many Quentin Tarantino rip-offs, a soundtrack of pop hits and a litany of big names in small parts, right down to the concluding cameo that feel as spot-on as it does superfluous. “Caught Stealing,” though, proves more than merely some glossy replicant by bringing its main character to genuine life.
To this point in his career, Butler has generally opted for a stylized approach to acting, but in “Caught Stealing” he shifts into a remarkably successful naturalistic register. He exudes a benevolence, and a righteous moral center, despite the character’s tendency toward being his own worst enemy. It’s what makes it so believable that his paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) would be so drawn to him. Butler and Kravitz, in fact, have some of the year’s most electrifying chemistry, two people who feel truly in love and excited by the other’s presence, and Aronofsky does not rush past it but revels in it, embodying one of the oldest, truest reasons we go to the movies, to see beautiful people carousing onscreen. And this is why when the script moves Yvonne aside, there is disappointment but also resonance; it hurts; it counts.
“Caught Stealing” is set in motion by Hank being left in the care of his punk next-door neighbor Russ’s (Matt Smith) cat when he needs to jump back across the pond for a family emergency. It doesn’t take long, though, for Russian mobsters to come looking for Russ, and Hasidic gangsters too, not to mention an NYPD narcotics detective, all of whom are searching for a key of which Hank belatedly realizes he has been left in possession. If the cat had been a black one, this might have signified Hank being caught under the cloud of bad luck, given how all the people in his close orbit suffer as he tries to finagle a way out of this jam. But the feline is a grey Siberian forest cat, and the script is careful to make clear that while Hank catches a truly bad break, he is equally guilty of bringing harm to the people closest to him via his own poor decision-making, all tied back to the car crash. And that’s why Aronofsky returning to the car crash again and again in flashback is not excessive but apt, demonstrating the cycle he is stuck in, and only through another car crash does he realize he can finally break that cycle and set himself free.