Darren Aronofsky has moved away from his signature full-bore melodrama and psychological realism with the crime thriller film Caught Stealing. The film stars Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a former baseball player turned bartender, who finds himself targeted by the criminal underworld of 1998 New York. With Caught Stealing, Aronofsky enters Guy Ritchie territory. The film features a motley assortment of oddball characters and unpredictable violence, reminiscent of Ritchie’s debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Caught Stealing, which is based on Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel of the same name, presently holds an 87% Rotten Tomatoes rating, the highest rating for any of Aronofsky’s feature directorial outings over the past 15 years, just above the 85% rating for the 2010 psychological horror film Black Swan, for which Aronofsky received his lone Best Director Academy Award nomination. While it’s highly unlikely that Caught Stealing will receive Academy Award recognition, it’s thoroughly refreshing to see a clearly reinvigorated Aronofsky take a break from his trademark bleakness with Caught Stealing and simply have fun.
Hank Thompson Is One of Darren Aronofsky’s Most Memorable Characters
Darren Aronofsky doesn’t explore the psychological depths of Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson in Caught Stealing as fully and mercilessly as he did with Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers in Black Swan and Mickey Rourke’s Randy Robinson in The Wrestler. However, Hank nonetheless emerges as one of the most empathetic and relatable characters in Aronofsky’s directorial career. Caring, loyal, and vulnerable to a fault, Hank, a struggling New York bartender whose once promising baseball career was cut short by a car accident, inspires genuine audience sympathy when his kindness endangers his life.
This transformation is set into motion when Hank agrees to babysit a cat named Bud for his next-door neighbor, Russ, a drug-dealing, Mohawk-loving English punk. When Russ skips town, two Russian criminals come looking for him, but redirect their wrath onto Hank, beating him so severely that he loses a kidney. This marks the beginning of a nightmarish odyssey for Hank, who is subsequently pursued by a dogged police detective and two sets of killers, the Russians and two Orthodox Jewish gangsters, all of whom want Hank to give them a specific item, a mysterious key, which the innocent Hank is unable to find.
Through Aronofsky’s razor-sharp direction and Butler’s charismatic presence, Hank develops into a distinctly unconventional and endearingly reluctant action hero whose primary motivation is to find a way out of the horrible situation he finds himself trapped in through no real fault of his own. Besides Hank’s girlfriend and mother, his most trusted associate amid his quest for survival is Bud. This aggressive and extremely intelligent cat proves to be invaluable to Hank, who is seemingly the only person whom Bud doesn’t want to bite.
‘Caught Stealing’ Ends Aronofsky’s 15-Year Slump
The overwhelmingly positive reaction to Caught Stealing is in stark contrast to the decidedly polarized reactions that Darren Aronofsky’s previous films have received over the past decade. The 2014 biblical drama film Noah, which grossed over $360 million at the worldwide box office — the highest total of Aronofsky’s career — was criticized by religious scholars for Aronofsky’s heavy reliance on creative invention and non-biblical sources in the film’s making.
Aronofsky’s 2022 psychological drama The Whale earned Brendan Fraser an Academy Award for his heartfelt performance as a morbidly obese English teacher who tries to repair a strained relationship with his teenage daughter. However, while Fraser’s performance received universal praise, the film itself has been heavily criticized for its handling of the subject of obesity. Moreover, The Whale was a box-office disappointment, as was Aronofsky’s previous directorial outing, the 2017 psychological horror film Mother!.
Caught Stealing also has the potential to represent another major career breakthrough for Aronofsky, if the film is successful enough at the box office to warrant a sequel, which would presumably be based on one of Caught Stealing author Charlie Huston’s two other Hank Thompson novels. Given how far removed Caught Stealing is from a typical Aronofsky directorial outing, it would be interesting to see how he would react to directing the first sequel of his career and launching a film franchise.
‘Caught Stealing’ Is Aronofsky’s Action Take on Martin Scorsese’s 1985 Black Comedy
Caught Stealing is a gritty love letter to the far-reaching corners and cultures of Darren Aronofsky’s native New York in the late 1990s, with a clear nod to Martin Scorsese. Just as Scorsese’s 1982 black comedy film The King of Comedy influenced Todd Phillips’ Joker, Caught Stealing represents an action-packed updating of Scorsese’s 1985 black comedy film After Hours. In Caught Stealing, the star of After Hours, Griffin Dunne, plays Paul, the owner of the bar where Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson works as a bartender before being hunted by the New York underworld.
In After Hours, Dunne plays Paul Hackett, a Manhattan office worker who finds himself continually lost within the underbelly of New York in the course of a single hellish night while simply trying to make his way home. However, while Paul’s mishap-laden quest takes the form of comedic surrealism, Hank’s journey in Caught Stealing, which has a longer timeline than After Hours, encompasses a pile of corpses and leaves him facing a very uncertain future of bad choices. Caught Stealing is in theaters now.
Caught Stealing
- Release Date
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August 29, 2025
- Director
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Darren Aronofsky
- Writers
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charlie huston
- Producers
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Ari Handel, Jeremy Dawson
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
