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It feels too easy to say Darren Aronofsky is the one who gets caught stealing in his latest directorial outing, not in the least because he doesn\u2019t seem to hide his intentions.\u00a0<\/span>Caught Stealing<\/i>, his 1998<\/span>-set crime thriller, is not shy about showing its inspirations from similar misadventures set in the Big Apple. Casting Griffin Dunne in a\u00a0supporting role harkens back to\u00a0<\/span>After Hours<\/i>; a speeding car under some elevated subway tracks recalls\u00a0<\/span>The French Connection<\/i>; even the presence of an unwitting feline sidekick seems to wink at\u00a0<\/span>Inside Llewyn Davis<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n While some of Aronofsky\u2019s auteurist stamp gets lost restaging some of Gotham\u2019s greatest cinematic hits,\u00a0<\/span>Caught Stealing<\/i> hardly feels like director-for-hire work. The filmmaker, himself a\u00a0born-and-bred New Yorker, made his name staging anxiety-ridden stories on the city streets. But Aronofsky\u2019s films, be they scrappy indies such as\u00a0<\/span>Pi<\/i> or flashier outings like\u00a0<\/span>Black Swan<\/i>, have tended to center on characters whose psychoses are primarily internal in origin but get amplified by the concrete jungle\u2019s overstimulation. He\u2019s never had a\u00a0protagonist quite like Austin Butler\u2019s Hank Thompson. The baseball phenom-turned-Lower East Side bartender at the heart of\u00a0<\/span>Caught Stealing<\/i> is a\u00a0hero in the mold of a\u00a0classic Hitchcockian \u200b\u201c<\/span>wrong man.\u201d Following a\u00a0sporting career that ended early in ignominy, Hank is not seeking any more trouble than a\u00a0night of heavy drinking or hooking up with his situationship (Zo\u00eb Kravitz). But all it takes is agreeing to cat-sit for his British neighbour, Matt Smith\u2019s mohawked punk Russ, to find himself drawn into an underworld of criminality by association alone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These various unsavoury figures Hank encounters cut a\u00a0wide cross-section across New York\u2019s ethnically diverse makeup. If they didn\u2019t cause so much misery, these characters could be paraded around like amusing attractions at a\u00a0nightclub Stefon might announce. This movie has everything: a\u00a0Puerto Rican enforcer (Bad Bunny), a\u00a0pair of Russian-Ukrainian thugs (one of whom is played with a\u00a0scene-stealing feral streak by Nikita Kukushkin), a\u00a0thickly-accented New York detective (Regina King), two Hasidic gangsters (Liev Schrieber and Vincent D\u2019Onofrio), and Carol Kane serving matzoh ball\u00a0soup.<\/span><\/p>\n Charlie Huston\u2019s script for\u00a0<\/span>Caught Stealing<\/i>, based on his novel of the same name, always hints that it\u2019s on the verge of some grand point about New York. That never arrives, but simply putting such a\u00a0vibrant mosaic of the city\u2019s population on display makes a\u00a0statement. The film is more focused on providing a\u00a0fun ride through grimy streets and dark alleys across three different boroughs than on presenting a\u00a0thesis on gentrification. Aronofsky, however, conveys his perspective through the material more clearly than Huston. Even on a\u00a0project like\u00a0<\/span>Caught Stealing<\/i>, he still finds a\u00a0way to incorporate his fascination with people who push their bodies to their breaking point. Hank endures most of the film\u2019s action while barely holding together a\u00a0series of stitches from a\u00a0recent surgery. Every blow he takes along this journey to escape the underworld\u2019s clutches registers with bruising, bloody force.<\/span><\/p>\n Aronofsky might not push any of these moments to the extremes of his horror-adjacent work, but it\u2019s a\u00a0notably more gruesome approach than most studio fare. If this is what his version of \u200b\u201c<\/span>selling out\u201d to the system looks like, other directors should be so lucky to make something this satisfying. Credit to Aronofsky: he gets caught trying.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n