In filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s (Mother!, Black Swan, The Fountain) often exhilarating, occasionally frustrating adaptation of Charlie Huston’s 2004 New York City-set crime-thriller, Caught Stealing, Henry “Hank” Thompson (Austin Butler, Dune: Part Two, Elvis, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), a born-and-bred Californian and onetime baseball prospect turned NYC bartender, obsessively wears a black-and-orange San Francisco Giants baseball cap, less out of a need to protect his head from the summer sun than as a reminder of a squandered future and subsequently, an aimless, inconsequential present.
Both totem and talisman, Hank’s baseball cap literally and figuratively connects him to an unrealized, unrealizable professional future — he lost everything, including his best friend and fellow athlete, Dale (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), in a devastating car accident more than a decade earlier — and to an offscreen mother who once, also long ago, mentored and coached him into a high school baseball phenom and a potential first-round draft pick. Still close to his California-based mother, Hank calls her regularly. Rather than signing off, though, with a perfunctory good-bye or an affirmation of mutual affection, however, Hank ends their calls with a reflexive “Go, Giants!” (We should all be so lucky.)
Set during the summer of 1998 as the baseball Giants made an unexpected, late season push for a National League wild-card berth (no spoilers, Wiki is right there), Caught Stealing mixes frequent radio and TV updates on the Giants’ turbulent season with a swirl of ever-escalating incidents directed at or involving Hank, mostly not of his choosing, outbursts of brutal, even fatal violence. Collectively, those incidents will determine not just Hank’s long-term future, but whether he’ll survive beyond the next hour, day, or week.
And it’s all due to Hank halfheartedly agreeing to cat-sit Bud (a scene-stealing Tonic), a regal Maine coon, for his next-door neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), a Brit punk defined by his Mohawk, a metal-studded leather jacket, and a perpetual Billy Idol-inspired snarl. Russ claims a family emergency in his native England requires his immediate attention and exits stage left. When, though, two viciously feral thugs, Nikita (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov), straight out of a ‘90s or early ‘00s Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino flick, appear suddenly at Russ’s door, it’s Hank who receives a life-threatening beating, a too-short stay at a local New York hospital, and some tender, sometimes loving care from his paramedic girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz).
Still recovering from his encounter with Nikita and Aleksei, Hank crosses paths with Elise Roman (Oscar and Emmy Award winner Regina King), a police detective obsessed with taking down the Russians and their off-screen employer, a flamboyant, Spanglish-speaking, mid-level drug dealer, Colorado (Benito A Martínez Ocasio, aka rapper/singer “Bad Bunny”), and Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio) Drucker, unironically observant Hasidic Jews and, in the words of other characters in the film, “monsters” for their contemptuous disregard toward human life, up to and including any obstacles to their numerous criminal enterprises.
Everyone on Hank’s rear, of course, wants what Russ left behind and what they assume Hank now possesses. Every attempt Hank makes to wriggle himself out of Russ’s mess inevitably leads to conflict of the ultra-violent kind, usually with a bewildered, semi-conscious Hank on the wrong end of a beatdown and/or fleeing for his life, across a pre-gentrified New York City boroughs (the Lower East Side, Flushing Meadows, Shea Stadium, and Coney Island, among others). Facing one potential beatdown after another, Hank’s long-dormant baseball skills (swinging, sliding, fielding) prove surprisingly handy.
Collaborating with an ace-level team led by production designer Mark Friedberg and cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Highest 2 Lowest, Maestro, The Whale), Aronofsky seamlessly recreates a pre-millennial, seedy, shabby Lower East Side where a borderline alcoholic Hank tends bar in a grimy, grungy dive owned by a graying, ponytailed semi-slacker, Paul (Griffin Dunne). A living, breathing cautionary tale for Hank, Paul remains fixated on past glories, repeatedly recounting his greatest hits to any paying customer within earshot.
Bolstered by composer Rob Simonsen’s relentlessly ferocious, post-punk score and Aronofsky’s masterful eye for visual storytelling (composition, camera movement, and editing), Caught Stealing rarely fails to engage or entertain across its 107-minute running time, though its story-, character-, and modal-related faults, formulaic in the first instance, a questionable reliance on caricatures in the second, and whiplash-inducing tonal shifts in the third, positively drop it from a first- to a second-tier Aronofsky effort.
Caught Stealing opens theatrically on Friday, August 29th, via Sony Pictures Releasing.
