Jane's Addiction Approves

Film: Caught Stealing
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on gigantic television.

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my constant enjoyment of film noir, including neo-noir. I also tend to like Darren Aronofsky, although he is frequently hit-or-miss. Aronofsky doing noir has a lot of potential, so Caught Stealing is a film that certainly had a great deal of potential. I feel the same way about Austin Butler. I haven’t made my mind up about him completely as an actor, although he certainly has the look. Say what you will about him, he’s certainly pretty.

Caught Stealing takes place a couple of years before the turn of the last century in New York. Former baseball standout, San Francisco Giants fan, and dive bar bartender Hank Thompson (Butler) has his life not so much together as built the way he wants it. He works at night, drinks too much, and spends his nights after work with his nurse girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). Everything is fine until his British punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) asks him to take care of his cat while he goes back to London to visit his ailing father.

The problems start just after Russ leaves for London. Two Russian mobsters, Aleksei and Microbe (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) show up to talk to Russ. Hank has the bad luck to be there when they show up, and the two of them tune him up to the point where he is hospitalized and needs to have a ruptured kidney removed. When he’s back in his apartment, he’s visited by police detective Elise Roman (Regina King), who informs him that Russ is drug dealer with connections to the Hasidic Drucker brothers, Lipa (Lieve Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio).

And as complicated as this is starting to get, it’s only going to get more so because that is the nature of film noir. Hank, realizing that Russ is clearly hiding something or in some kind of trouble, discovers that Russ has planted a fake turd in the cat’s litterbox, and inside is a key. To what? No idea, but he lets Detective Roman know, and suddenly the world goes to hell. After a drunken night (despite his promise to Yvonne to stop drinking because he now has only one kidney), Hank leaves his clothing outside his apartment building, leaving the mystery key in his pocket. The next morning, he is aggressively interrogated by the two Russians along with their handler Colorado (Bad Bunny), but he can’t remember what happened to the key. He leaves Russ’s cat with Yvonne and remembers what he’s done with the key. When he does, he returns to Yvonne and discovers she’s been killed.

What’s the upshot of all of this? It turns out the Russ really did go back to London because his father had a stroke, but since Russ was acting as the bank for the Russians, the Druckers, and (surprise surprise) Detective Roman, even if he comes up with the money, he’s a dead man—so now he’s looking for Hank to be his fall guy as well.

There’s a lot here that really works for Caught Stealing in terms of it being a noir. The plot is very convoluted and continues to get more and more complicated as the film goes on until we reach a point where all of the threads can be tied together. Hank is a very good patsy—troubled (we learn of a car accident in his past that cost him his baseball career), just bright enough to realize he’s in trouble and just bright enough to do a few things that might actually work. And the bad guys are genuinely bad. Virtually everyone here is a criminal and absolutely soulless.

Aronofsky also has enough pull that he can cast whomever he wants, even for small roles. Griffin Dunne is a fun addition to this (as Hank’s boss), as is Carol Kane as the grandmother of the Druckers. Laura Dern plays Hank’s mom, who appears a few times on the phone to him, and only appears on camera for a minute or two in a mid-credits sequence.

The reality is that Caught Stealing is a pretty good noir, but there are plenty that I like a lot more. I enjoyed this, and there are moments that are surprising funny, even if most of it is not. IMDb calls this (among other things) a comedy, but there was a single solid laugh for me in the whole film.

I think Aronofsky is one of those directors who is destined to someday win an Oscar for his work (much like Nolan won for Oppenheimer at least in part as a career Oscar), but Caught Stealing will not be the film that wins it for him.

Why to watch Caught Stealing: If you get past the premise, it’s pretty great.
Why not to watch: Boy, is it dark visually.