Early in Caught Stealing, the camera surveys a lively dive bar in New York’s East Village, circa last call. A subtitle labels the year as 1998, though that’s almost unnecessary with a track from Garbage’s Version 2.0 blasting. Hank (Austin Butler) is the bartender trying to coax young drinkers into wrapping things up. But it’s Hank’s boss who draws the immediate connection to a classic film (just a few weeks shy of its 40th anniversary at the time of this film’s release): Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. That’s because the bar’s owner is played by an older, grungier Griffin Dunne, sharing the name Paul with the lost yuppie he played in the Scorsese picture. Maybe Paul finally got fed up with that data-entry job and moved downtown for good, embracing 15 years of rough living. But if director Darren Aronofsky intended to make Caught Stealing his own version of Scorsese’s dark-comic overnight odyssey, the scan starts to glitch early on, not least because the movie repeatedly ventures into the daylight.
Hank isn’t exactly a restless Manhattan go-getter lost in a scary urban jungle. He’s an affable and good-natured (if seemingly underachieving) California-to-NYC transplant, who comes home to an Alphabet City apartment stocked with booze and sometimes graced by the presence of Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), the paramedic he’s been seeing. Butler is so likable that it takes a little while to fully register his alcohol dependency, perhaps more emotional than physical; a series of quick, harrowing flashbacks to a moment from his days as a hotshot high school baseball player fill in what, exactly, Hank has come to New York to escape from.
Aronofsky handles this with a surprisingly light touch, at least compared to the bathos he brought to The Whale, the kind of Oscar-winning success that can nonetheless inspire some much-needed soul-searching. Like Aronofsky’s previous film, Caught Stealing is another adaptation where the original writer—in this case, novelist Charlie Huston—takes screenplay duties. Also like The Whale, it’s not as style-forward as Aronofsky’s earliest films; quite unlike The Whale, Aronofsky doesn’t appear to be genuflecting at the profundity of the source material. He might even be having a good time.
For a little while, at least. When some Russian thugs show up at Hank’s building looking for his mohawked neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), who has abruptly jetted home to London to see his dying father, Caught Stealing seems like it’s setting up a crime caper doubling as an unlikely recovery narrative. By sheer wrong-place-wrong-timing, Hank catches a beating so severe that his health is permanently altered, necessitating him giving up alcohol. This isn’t the end of his problems; soon enough, a cop (Regina King), a gangster (Bad Bunny), and a pair of armed Hasidic Jews (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), among others, all come looking for Russ and/or Hank in turn, on the hunt for something Russ may have hidden from his criminal associates. Looks like Hank picked the wrong week to quit drinking.
Yet while the story’s basic set-up jointly recalls After Hours, Coen Brothers-style malicious fates (an errant cat is involved), and maybe a touch of Guy Ritchie’s antics, Caught Stealing’s sometimes-jarring tone keeps readjusting to a grimmer frequency. Scorsese may specialize in anguish, but many of his movies have a pitch-black sense of humor, often impressively integrated into tense and violent material, providing appropriate catharsis, or laughs that catch in your throat. (After Hours, probably the closest he’s ever come to a full-on comedy, may have fewer laugh-out-loud moments than Goodfellas or The Departed.) Caught Stealing does nab the dubious title of “Aronofsky’s funniest movie” from the likes of The Wrestler or mother!; among its highlights is a smash cut to a bar singalong of a very late ’90s track that’s even funnier when you picture how insanely out of place it would be in any other movie he’s ever directed. So maybe it’s the source novel that dictates a few particularly hellish plot turns, or maybe it’s Aronofsky who has trouble properly setting them up. Regardless, some major pivots designed to raise the stakes have precisely the opposite effect, deflating tension by shellshocking and slowing down Hank’s scrappy ballplayer’s physicality.
At any speed, though, Butler shines. The man is a movie star, perfect poised to keep pace with Matthew Libatique’s gliding camera, even when Hank runs around with a hitch in his step from a gnarly set of stitches. He and Kravitz may have to engage in a few too many convenient exchanges complaining about Giuliani-era gentrification, but their chemistry is palpable, and so are their differing levels of New Yorkiness, as she playfully ribs his mama’s-boy out-of-towner vibe. The movie doesn’t need to lay Hank’s weaknesses on too thick, because Butler’s angular, haunted face and body language so clearly and casually conveys who this guy is—someone whose closer relationships are held at bay by his suppressed guilt. Aronofsky lays it on thick anyway. The eventual manifestations of Hank’s guilt are bleak enough that Scorsese himself might well wonder if the characters have been punished enough by the halfway mark.
It’s remarkable, then, how well Caught Stealing holds together as entertainment; as much as Aronofsky seems incapable of the modulation needed to make a crime caper, he’s also a big part of why this particular variation works anyway. At times, the movie resembles the director running through his greatest hits, with its Lower Manhattan setting (like Pi, released the year this movie takes place), forays into Brighton Beach (like Requiem For A Dream), and athletic lead character felled by the limitations of his abused body (The Wrestler) as well as his addiction issues (Requiem again), despite an obsessive and mother-abetted fixation on his initial field of excellence (Black Swan). Only in this version of things, there’s nothing operatic or especially punk-rock going on (despite Russ’s vintage/outdated guise); with the movie’s combination of grunge and slickness, the late-’90s alt-pop on the soundtrack makes some thematic sense.
Maybe Caught Stealing’s unpleasant tonal jitters do, too. Some part of Aronofsky may want to evoke the darkly funny mishaps of a vintage crime comedy, but something else keeps coaxing him halfway down dark alleyways, before the movie scrambles back into more comic-adjacent urgency. It’s that run-and-stop-short rhythm that makes Caught Stealing feel more like a fraught, imperfect recovery than a Requiem-style spiral into hell, and an unusually balanced New York portrait. The city of Aronofsky’s early career is neither a paradise lost to gentrification nor a metropolis of the damned. It’s just a bustling microcosm of a pitiless world with plenty of places to hide.
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Charlie Huston
Starring: Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio
Release Date: August 29, 2025
