You’re Telling Me You Missed This Austin Butler Film?

Caught F**kin Stealing. Darren Aronofsky hasn’t quite made a film like his latest. An out and out caper that aims high in the entertainment department and ends up making the basket. A film full of heart and full of b*lls. Who’d believe he’s the director of Requiem for a Dream (2000), Black Swan (2010), mother! (2017) and The Whale (2022)?

Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a washed-up baseball prodigy now bartending at a Manhattan bar. Zoe Kravitz is Yvonne, his paramedic love interest who becomes a major pivot in the plot as it changes gears from zany to emotional. The film also stars Bad Bunny as Colorado, a Puerto Rican enforcer, and Matt Smith in what’s easily the most outrageously funny part of his life. Liev Schreiber is a Jewish mobster.

Hank’s busy living out his days serving drinks and guzzling his beer, when trouble begins. His British neighbour, the shady and mohawked Russ (Smith in a vivid mohawk), is rushing for his home country on the pretext of seeing an ailing father in the dead of the night and wants Hank to take care of his cat (a splendid Siberian Forest cat with an exquisite mane) Bud. But furry Bud’s litter box contains a hairy little situation: a ‘fake poo’ that conceals a key. Russ is hiding some very bad people’s ill-gotten money, all part of an elaborate misunderstanding. It’s exactly the kind of thing that jump-starts these stories, but the way Caught Stealing keeps it going is why it’s an essential big-screen experience (I watched it on an upmarket Delhi NCR multiplex screen, with exactly two other audience members and my own plus one).

Caught Stealing could have easily become a predictable chase with manufactured thrills and contrived violence. Instead, it expands the soft emotional beat at its core—the tragic career derailment of a gifted athlete (revealed in four smooth flashbacks), the sorrowful recent bereavement of said gifted athlete, and the shot at redemption he’s been promised in the form of another fragile life—Bud. The film skirts the screenplay language and thematic choices of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino films, and then returns to the protagonist.

Instead of lingering mournfully on the proceedings or trying to desperately milk tragedy for grief and revenge, the screenplay (by Charlie Huston, who wrote the novel the film’s based on) remains rooted in the current problem at hand. It remembers Hank’s unending love for baseball and the team he cheers for—the San Francisco Giants—a love he shares with his mother (Laura Dern, in an adorable post-credits reveal) and former coach. It’s in tender sequences, like a character’s final moments spent on the subway, lingering shots of Bud observing his new caretaker—and even in the fond gaze and loving Yiddish of the Druckers’ mother (Carol Kane). Aronofsky nails the thaw as much as he relishes the freeze.

The other wholly enjoyable aspect of this crime actioner that’s also funny when it wants to be, is how it brings back unforced ’90s nostalgia. The nighttime establishments, the payphones, the TV programming and a general unhurried sense to life, all swept up in one smooth flourish. Butler’s both charming and effective, Regina King as a corrupt NYPD cop brings subversion to the otherwise assured and karmic goings on. Matt Smith is burlesque, bursting with both pathos and humour in—as I have said before—a thoroughly entertaining turn.