Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something.
Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in the late 1990s who agrees to babysit his neighbour’s cat, not realising that punk Russ (Matt Smith) is on the wrong side of some scary people, who aren’t all that discriminating when it comes to monstering. Russ being away in London at his dad’s funeral, so he says, street hoodlums Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) have soon decided that Hank (Butler) will do, and that whatever it is that they wanted from Russ they can extract from Hank instead. He is subjected to such a monumental beating that he ends up in hospital minus a kidney.
No spoiler. All this happens early doors, and is just a warm-up for the main act, which is two even scarier dudes, referred to as the “Hasidics” by ballsy cop Detective Roman (Regina King). The Hasidics are played by Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, but there’s so much hair, beard and whatnot going on that it’s hard to tell.
Zoë Kravitz is also along for the ride, as the booty-call girlfriend Hank might be about to get serious with. Anyone else? Yes, Griffin Dunne, as the owner of a local bar. He was in After Hours, wink wink.
Butler and Kravitz take their tops off a fair bit, which helps pass the time, and the rest of the actors go large on their characters, chewing through accents, while Aronofsky portions out time as if everyone were moonlighting on his film while they worked for real elsewhere. No one apart from Butler is in it very much.
Hank is the glue holding this thing together and Butler does a pretty good job with material that’s been round the block a few times. Voluble bad guys. Comedy ethnics. Funny violence (though barely funny) and a strange sequence towards the end when Hank winds up at the family home of the Hasidics, where he is treated with charm and respect – a bit like those “lets all take a breather” sections in John Wick where the various hitman call a halt to all their “business” while they’re at the Continental hotel. Or those “gangsters at home with momma” moments in Scorsese’s films.
The prevailing spirit is Tarantino, though, and it’s obviously another of the current wave of neo-Tarantino movies, and it seems inevitable that eventually Hank will be being pursued by all the bad guys, plus the cops, with quips being scattered hither and yon as everyone hares towards a bloody finale.
A curious film-maker, Aronofsky is very on-off – hits like The Wrestler and The Whale or Black Swan and then genuinely terrible guff like Noah. This sits between the two poles. It’s obviously not a personal project, as his earlier films like Pi and Requiem for a Dream were. Nor is it just a big studio number where Aronofsky has ceded control entirely to phalanxes of producers certain they understand movies better than the creatives.
It looks good – Aronofsky films always do – the stars are enjoyable, the plot is a warm wallow in familiarity, but there’s just a mismatch of tone and content somewhere. It’s probably that early beating that Hank gets – it’s genuinely shocking. If violence looks like it hurts, no amount of cartoon japery and quippage is going to paper over the cracks.
Caught Stealing – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
