RATING
Director(s): Darren Aronofsky
Country: United States
Author: Charlie Huston
Actor(s): Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoe Kravitz
Written by Tom Augustine
‘Maybe kindness is the new punk rock’, Superman intones in his new film, aptly titled Superman. I generally enjoyed the film, but didn’t care for that line. The line is positioned as the film’s worldview, aligning itself with a countercultural movement that is notable for its anti-fascistic tendencies. It’s an ongoing flaw of the modern discourse, equating the belief in the negation of fascism with being ‘nice’. Beyond that, the idea that Superman, the most known and beloved of all comic book creations, a hyper-American commercial vehicle, could be considered ‘counterculture’ is laughable. The mainstreaming of punk, which is first and foremost an anti-establishment, anti-commercial, even anarchistic movement, is a dangerous neutering of its ideals. All that said, I’d much rather a blatantly wrong characterisation of punk and punk rock like the one seen in Superman than the fugazi that is Darren Aronofsky’s deeply annoying Caught Stealing. If Superman mischaracterises certain ideas of punk, Caught Stealing rips it off wholesale and wears it like a Leatherface mask, one that was incidentally purchased at a Hot Topic. It’s an empty fetishisation of punk, one that pays lip service the way a bad music biopic namedrops famous singers in their subject’s orbit. Aronofsky, a filmmaker who strains desperately to be considered both an artiste and a purveyor of renegade, outsider art, while being neither, is the vision behind Caught Stealing, a ‘fun’, twisty-turny thriller in the mould of nineties Tarantino ripoffs whose conception of punk, in both narrative and aesthetic, is as stale as week-old pizza.
Did you know Caught Stealing is set in New York City? Don’t worry, the film will remind you ad nauseum. This film is a period piece, of sorts, set in the late 1990s (the first shot is of the World Trade Center, the first of many excruciatingly over-considered gestures toward bad taste) in a New York overdosing on grime and grit — but also, hey! Coney Island! Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs! Kim’s Video! — and ‘kooky’ amoral gangsters of various ethnic minorities. Into this cockroach-infested maelstrom steps Hank (Austin Butler), an ex-baseball player whose career was cut short by a traffic accident that killed a friend and teammate. Playing chicken with a full-blown case of alcoholism, Hank agrees to take care of his neighbour Russ’ (Matt Smith, in full ‘awright guv’ Britpunk drag) cat while he travels home to attend to his dying father. Suddenly, all manner of gangsters are beating down Hank’s door, in search of a key allegedly in Russ’ possession, setting off a chain reaction of violence and mayhem, with Hank and his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) caught in the middle. Caught Stealing feels not so much like an evocation of empty, pointless crime sagas of the nineties as one simply stuck in that period, right down to its gleefully nihilistic relationship to brutality and its cringe-inducing sexual politics. That’s the apt word, to borrow a Gen Z term — Caught Stealing is overwhelmingly, exhaustingly cringe, a film that feels like an old man’s attempt to be hip, exerting itself to present a disaffected worldview while also layering in treacly sentimentality that’s curdled on arrival. Looked at in a certain light, it’s an interesting progression for Aronofsky, whose operatic self-seriousness has been his defining feature. His last film, theThe Whale, was the nadir of this kind of storytelling — an indulgent slice of misery immensely satisfied with its ugliness. Caught Stealing eventually gives way to its own kind of misery — the plodding, whatever kind that comes with empty bloodletting — but Aronofsky also seems to be trying to do a ‘fun one’, in turn doubling down on his poseur tendencies.
An excruciating attempt to pivot to high-octane adult thrills after the dour mess of The Whale, Darren Aronofsky’s attempted punk odyssey strains for dirtbag nastiness, but never loses its sense of self-consciousness. In spite of a magnetic lead performance from Austin Butler, its many Tarantino-esque shenanigans strain to convince, mixing sentimentality and graphic violence into an unappetising gruel.
Aronofsky’s aesthetic fetishisation is one thing, and could be forgivable. Honestly, it even seems likely to be in the opening stretches of Caught Stealing, as the film gallops largely enjoyably from one scenario to another, guided by Butler’s easy, movie star charisma. One of his generation’s more promising, exciting stars, Butler has proven his chops as a performer (including an absolute belter of a scene in Eddington, also in cinemas now), but is still in search of the vehicle to elevate him to DiCaprio-esque superstardom. It’s on its way, surely — and early on, one suspects he may have found it here. His Hank is alluring, intriguing, yet totally vulnerable — he spends much of the film nursing a recent surgical wound and a killer hangover. Best is his chemistry with Kravitz, who is an ideal, spunky foil for Butler’s hangdog routine, a nurse who seems to have been raised on Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead. There’s plenty of charming-enough denizens of New York’s underclass populating the fringes of the film to justify investing in Hank’s half-cocked mission to locate Russ’ key. That is, until the film makes a narrative choice a third into the film that fatally miscalculates what is half-interesting about Caught Stealing. You’ll know it when you see it. From there, the film spirals into unrepentant nastiness, occasionally remembering that it wanted to be funny, trying to lace humour into its escalating parade of cold-blooded murders and falling flat on its face every time.
The mind boggles as to why Aronofsky and writer Charlie Huston make some of the narrative choices they do here. After the aforementioned ‘twist’, the film focuses far more on a panoply of embarrassing gangster stereotypes, including two Hasidim assassins (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, desperately trying to inject some genuine pathos into a withering husk of a third act) a Puerto Rican drug lord played by Bad Bunny, and a renewed focus on Russ. There’s also Regina King, slumming it as a matriarchal cop guiding Hank through the underworld — it’s an incredible pedigree for a film that shares this much DNA with, say, Smokin’ Aces. There’s also the cute cat, an eyerolling attempt to add a dash of ‘unexpected’ tenderness to proceedings. The brief presence of Griffin Dunne, star of Scorsese’s antic, horny masterwork After Hours, is a hat-tip to a far superior film of which Caught Stealing lives in the shadow. As with most Scorsese or Tarantino rip-offs (and this film borrows liberally from both), the film misjudges what is actually interesting or valuable about these filmmakers — it is not the playful use of character archetypes, nor the gleeful ultraviolence. It is the energy they inject into proceedings, the feeling that you are in the hands of one who can bend the shape of cinema to his will. In my favourite of Aronofsky’s films, the largely dismissed Noah, the director’s attempts to fulfil some artistic vision of himself seemed to fall away, allowing for genuine, bizarre invention on a blockbuster scale. That was over ten years ago. To again borrow a term, this one from my own childhood in New Zealand: Aronofsky needs to stop being such a tryhard if he wants to make a good film again.
Caught Stealing is in cinemas now.