Is there a more cosmopolitan and international city than New York? The first stop and final destination for transatlantic migrants and drifters crying “Eastward-ho” alike, it’s the perfect setting for Caught Stealing, a street-smart crime caper from director Darren Aronofsky.
If the director of Requiem for a Dream and The Whale doesn’t seem a likely source of mirth, guess again. His old-school black comedy feels like it fell straight out of the golden age of sardonic crime novels from the likes of Gregory McDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Dave Barry. No surprise, since those novels were such a clear influence on Caught Stealing, the 2005 novel by Charlie Huston that Aronofsky has turned into a bloody-knuckled laugh riot.
Set in 1998, Caught Stealing the movie is a deliberate throwback, and not just in its sense of humor. It’s in its sense of a New York that doesn’t quite exist anymore. That’s because New York is always changing and if you snooze you’ll lose track. That’s what happened to former baseball hopeful turned Lower East Side barkeeper Hank (Butler, Elvis, Dune: Part Two), who is caught off guard to discover the Russian mob is now such a presence in his neighborhood. But it’s NYC, the ultimate melting pot, which is why Russian actors Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin appear as a pair of post-Perestroika enforcers with a brutal but creative approach to violence, and how they can rub shoulders with gun-toting Tony Montana wannabe, Colorado (Bad Bunny in a surprisingly entertaining turn).
Their interest in Hank actually stems from another migrant, Russ (the inimitable Matt Smith, aka Doctor Who’s second-best Doctor), the punk next door who suddenly departs and leaves his neighbor to cat sit. What Russ leaves behind is a little more than just a few days of cat food, and ends up endangering Hank, his situationship with paramedic Yvonne (Kravitz), and his preciously maintained and booze-fueled extended adolescence.
In adapting his own book for the screen, Huston has cut back on the blunter, more brusque, James Ellroy-esque elements, and made his NYC a little wilder and weirder. Russ, for example, is an upstate New York native in the book, but shifting his origin to London means Smith can turn him into a perfect lampoon of the kind of guy that thought mohawks and Cockney accents were still cool two decades after the Sex Pistols played the 100 Club.
Huston has also simplified and streamlined Hank’s story while also giving it greater depth. Hank’s reason for running away from California becomes more impactful, giving Butler his most rounded and fun leading role to date. In both Elvis and The Bikeriders there was a sense of enigma about his characters, men who didn’t understand themselves or were donning a mask for the outside world. Hank’s problem is that he knows exactly who he is, even if every gangster between Brighton Beach and Yankee Stadium has the wrong idea about this hapless fool.
Pulsing up and down the arterial route of the B train from Brooklyn to the Bronx, Caught Stealing is a portrait of NYC at its most grimily charming. Even the most merciless of monsters, Hasidic gunsels Shmully and Lipa, speak to the boisterous heart of the Big Apple. As played by D’Onofrio and Schreiber (wonderful if unrecognizable under beard, fedora, and kapote), they still take time to see their bubbe on Shabbat. When that bubbe happens to the absolute legend of New York that is Carol Kane, it’s just wild joy and absurd elation. Aronofsky may still be able to put his protagonist through the meat grinder, but there’s a cackling laugh to be had from this carnage.
