Caught Stealing (2025)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Charlie Huston
Stars: Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, Vincent D’Onofrio, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Griffin Dunne, Regina King, Bad Bunny, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Will Brill, Nikita Kukushkin, Eric Ian
Plot: Hank Thompson was once a promising high school baseball player, but those days are gone. Still, life seems to be treating him fairly well: he has a beautiful girlfriend, a steady job as a bartender in a seedy New York dive, and his favorite team is in the middle of a surprising title run. But when his punk-rock neighbor asks him to look after his cat for a few days, Hank suddenly finds himself caught up in a dangerous mess—hunted down by a crew of ruthless gangsters.
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Take the baseball from Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997)—a relic from a Giants-Dodgers game and the thread binding together a monumental portrait of a fragmented, decaying America—and place it in the hands of Darren Aronofsky. With Caught Stealing, he veers into a euphoric, unexpected divertissement where sport and fandom drift through the New York of the Giuliani era: the 1990s city, still shabby and outcast, where the harsh notes of “zero tolerance” cast long shadows onto our present.
Based on Charlie Huston’s novel Caught Stealing. 1998, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hank (Austin Butler), an unwitting victim of a schizoid crime conspiracy, is less a Cary Grant in Hitchcockian intrigue than a Thomas Pynchon-style misfit. Once a promising baseball player, now a bartender after a car accident cut his career short, he’s a boisterous everyman devoted to the Giants and to drinking. Because of a crooked neighbor, he’s swept into a turf war between the Russian and Jewish mobs, with an inevitable MacGuffin sparking a breathless tour de force across the city—riddled with shifting identities and perilous alliances.
After the hallucinatory ecological microcosm of mother! and the massive, intimate shipwreck of The Whale, with Caught Stealing the New York director moves into a kind of redevelopment—akin to the gentrified neighborhoods in which the story is set—of his own cinema. Yet his bold expressive hallmarks remain: visceral plunges into existential wounds and oblique dramaturgical excesses, here distilled into a deeply personal detour that is both playful and cathartic. Nearly thirty years after his debut with π, Aronofsky reveals a sensitivity for more introspective, evocative refinements—an impulse shared by several filmmakers in the post-pandemic era, often colored by autobiographical tones (Spielberg with The Fabelmans, James Gray with Armageddon Time, Tarantino with his essayistic memoir Cinema Speculation).
The director’s Jewish and Russo-Ukrainian roots, along with his indie apprenticeship in mapping the city (π and Requiem for a Dream shot across Brooklyn, Coney Island, and Brighton Beach), resurface in Hank’s peripheral, disjointed, adrenaline-driven, and Kafkaesque odyssey. They also anchor a loftier articulation of intent, reaching beyond a faint, subterranean nostalgia. Beneath the narrative form—contemporary yet classically inflected, fractured by ellipses, punctuated by nightmare—lies, with more tenderness than longing, a fictional testimony of New York at the turn of the millennium. For Aronofsky, it was a formative city: marked by postmodern echoes, street culture, and the raw human fauna of the many drowned and few saved—a flow of life now extinct.
In its ironic blending of genre codes—gangster film, action, black comedy—this might quietly lay claim to being, at heart, just a buddy movie: Hank and the Siberian cat he’s forced to lug around, Bud (nomen omen), both marked by injury (a knee, a paw), reluctant antiheroes of a picaresque odyssey. Their journey is saturated with emblematic voices of the decade and with other favored influences, resting on a ground that is neither scattershot nor ingratiating, always engaging. On the paradigm of Scorsese’s After Hours, the film channels Spike Lee’s sharp-edged multicultural verve, the narrative DNA of Pynchon, DeLillo, and Elmore Leonard, a punk acidity, pulp inflections, the lucid chaos of the Safdie brothers, the New York spatiality of the Coens—oppressive and rigid indoors, cyclical and annihilating outdoors—all accompanied by a feline presence (Inside Llewyn Davis).
The arrival at an Ithaca that is anything but stars-and-stripes becomes a redefinition of the American Dream—not the triumphalist version, but one belonging to the perennial outsiders, the forgotten souls of Preston Sturges. From them, Aronofsky draws—against the grain of his unsettling aesthetic—a surprising directorial lightness, which explodes in the finale with tropical, postcard-like imagery. Is it a disenchanted seal, or the zero degree of a renewed maturity still to come?
Martina, Volpato, Cineforum, September 5, 2025
