You Are Trapped in the Middle, Punk: Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing with Austin Butler

CAUGHT STEALING 

(Darren Aronofsky, 2025, USA, 107 minutes) 

The police, the police and the thieves (oh yeah) 

You gotta lick the ground 

But you are trapped in the middle, punk

--The Clash by way of Junior Murvin (1977)

Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing isn't a film noir–it's an action movie, a thriller–but it's based around the noir trope of the ordinary joe who gets in over his head. Waaay over his head. And not because he's done anything wrong, but because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because he was associating with the wrong people. In this case: every one of those things. When the antihero's fortunes take a turn, which happens immediately after the film begins, the downturn accelerates from bad to worse to hellacious. 

Granted, Henry "Hank" Thompson (a never-better Austin Butler, last seen mostly looking cool in Bikeriders) is hardly perfect, but he doesn't mean anyone any harm. He's his own worst enemy, and he knows it, but he's also a relatively young dude who doesn't realize how good he has it--until he starts to lose it all--because he's so focused on what he doesn't have. 

When he was in high school, Hank had a shot at a professional baseball career–until a car crash took that dream away from him forever. Not to give too much away, but I suspect that Aronofsky--or Charlie Huston, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel--is an animal lover, because the four-legged creatures in the film make out pretty well, while the two-legged ones don't (a hungry creature inadvertently sets the crash in motion).  

Hank's regret is understandable, not least when the director reveals the extent of the damage, but the accident wasn't really his fault. I mean, it was, but his attempt to do the right thing at the time went spectacularly wrong. If he wasn't completely sozzled then, his life now revolves around booze.

The "now" of the film: 1998. Mr. Stop and Frisk himself, Rudy Giuliani, is Mayor, and the Twin Towers dominate the skyline. Hank works at a bar on the Lower East Side (an unrecognizable Griffin Dunne, who navigated a nightmarish New York 40 years before in Scorsese's After Hours, plays his boss), he has a hot girlfriend, Yvonne (tiny, smoky-eyed Zoë Kravitz), who works as an EMT, and he checks in regularly with his SF Giants-obsessed mother (a voice on the telephone). He's also a functional alcoholic. 

If Hank keeps drinking, his functioning will surely suffer, and Yvonne may strike out for greener pastures, but for now, he's holding it together, for the most part–aside from the Requiem for a Dream-like nightmares in which he's back behind the wheel of an out-of-control car in the middle of nowhere. He's less than thrilled when his punk-rock neighbor, Russ (Doctor Who's Matt Smith with towering mohawk and cockney patois), sticks him with his bitey tabby, Buddy (Tonic the Cat), when he leaves for the UK to visit his ailing father, but with Yvonne's encouragement, Hank takes him in.

Car crash and alcoholism aside, this could almost be the start of a romantic comedy until two Russians (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov), who come looking for Russ, beat the shit out of Hank instead. Russ has something they want, and he has no idea what it is, but others will come looking for the same thing, including a tough-talking Puerto Rican (Benito A. Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), a sarcastic cop with a yen for Kosher delicacies (Regina King), and two Hasidic henchmen (a perfectly-matched Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio), equally capable of extreme sadism–they like to remove the eyes of their victims–and charming sweetness, a trait inherited from their beloved Bubbe (Carol Kane, capping off a run of great Yiddish-speaking roles going all the way back to Joan Micklin Silver's 1975 Hester Street). 

Like recent NYC thrillers, from Benny and Josh Safdie's Uncut Gems to Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest, our protagonist races all over a gentrifying city to solve the mystery, to stay alive, and to keep his loved ones from harm. 

As with Oscar Isaac in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, he has a cat with him all the while. As cat daddies go, Hank transforms, over the course of the film, from disinterested--and even cavalier--to gold-metal material. 

Just as the Safdies turned to electronic composer Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, to keep things moving in Gems, Aronofsky turned to British post-punkers Idles, who offer my favorite score of the year next to the Young Fathers' quasi-psychedelic work for Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later (Rob Simonsen wrote the instrumental tracks; Idles performed everything). 

The band's bass-heavy sound is perfect for the scuzzy, darkly humorous tone the director establishes, and that includes their heavy, slowed-down cover of Junior Murvin's reggae classic "Police and Thieves," which arrives at the opportune time and plays like the Clash's 1977 cover on Quaaludes. 

The diegetic songs by other artists serve mostly as ironic counterpoint, none more so than Magnetic Fields' "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," which premiered on 69 Love Songs in...1999, but no matter. Hank doesn't "have wheels" and won't be taking anyone "for a ride," since swearing off cars after he once destroyed one. (If you're expecting to hear Jane's Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing," however, you’ll leave disappointed.)

Left: Sean Gullette on the Lower East Side

I won't say how things end, but it's everything Aronofsky's last film, 2022's divisive The Whale, was not. The director has had a rollercoaster career since his 1998 debut, Pi–also set in the Lower East Side–which impressed me with its originality and striking imagery. I'm not sure I understood it all, but it left me dazzled anyway.

Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Mother! also offered plenty of razzle dazzle--I haven't seen The Fountain or Noah--but the unrelenting gloom of The Whale made me think he'd lost his way. 

In comparison, his ninth feature film plays more like an exercise in genre than an artistic statement, which may sound programmatic–and to some extent, it is–but as darkly comic New York thrillers go, it's a total blast. 

Though I was impressed as anyone by blond, blue-eyed Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, a counterintuitive casting choice that paid big dividends, he's never impressed me more than he does in Caught Stealing, in which he gives a more relaxed performance in a film that is anything but relaxing. 

For what it's worth, I've been a fan of the actor since the CW's shockingly good Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries, in which Butler played Carrie Bradshaw's more sexually-experienced love interest. In Aronofsky’s film, he plays a version of that character after all of his dreams have died; still young, still sexy, but on the precipice between a decent, if unspectacular life and a tragic one. 

Beyond the running, the fighting, and the fucking, Hank loves his mom (who gets a reveal at the end), learns to love a cat, and cries without seeming hapless or pathetic--Charlie Huston's pitiless screenplay combined with Darren Aronofsky's dynamic direction gives him a lot to cry about. 

Like the movie star he has become, Butler also manages to look good, even when he looks bad, if you know what I mean, and his transformation at the end pushes that idea to the extreme in ways both hilarious and ingenious.

In a manner of speaking: punk rock (and a cat) saves Hank's life.  

Caught Stealing opens in Seattle on Fri, Aug 29, at the Meridian, Pacific Place, the Varsity, and other area theaters. Images from the IMDb (Austin Butler and Tonic the Cat in the flesh and on the poster, Butler and Zoë Kravitz, and Butler and Matt Smith) and Artisan via Rotten Tomatoes (Sean Gullette in a screen shot from Pi's 25th anniversary re-release trailer).