By Darren Aronofsky is a director who knows how to make a compelling lead character. Whether it be in Black Swan, The Whale, or Requiem For A Dream, if you’re a lead in an Aronofsky movie, there’s a good shot that not only will the actor depicting them get critical adulation for their performance, but that the character is going to get put through the ringer. Even in his cheerier movies, which are few and far between, his leads more often than not end their movies in far worse positions than they were in the beginning, and Caught Stealing is no exception.
If you’re going into Caught Stealing expecting something energetic and full of zip, then I wouldn’t blame you. The trailers present the movie as a fast-paced crime thriller starring Austin Butler that shows him pissing off numerous crime families in New York City and being hunted all the while. And while all of that is still true, the trailers do a great job of hiding how dark the film actually is. At first, I worried if this was Aronofsky trying to appeal to a mainstream audience, and while it does broach that area sometimes, it’s still an Aronofsky movie.
His characters continue to be deeply troubled people. Everyone ends up worse than when they began. At points, it can be outright bleak and depressing. It does have some jolts of action and comedy to perk things up, but it has a lot in common with Baby Driver, wherein both appear to be action comedies, but the reality is much darker and more uncomfortable than it seems.
Caught Stealing
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Release Date: August 29, 2025 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
Hank (Austin Butler) is a bartender in NYC who isn’t exactly living a glamorous life, but it’s one he at least appears to be somewhat okay with. He works at a bar, is hooking up with a paramedic named Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz), and has a fairly okay apartment, albeit with a loud and brash English neighbor named Russ (Matt Smith). One day, Russ has to go to the UK to be with his hospitalized dad, and asks Hank to take care of his cat. While Russ is away though, several groups of mobsters try to break into Russ’s apartment looking for something, and Hank unintentionally gets caught in the crossfire and becomes involved in a small gang war over a key he discovers in the litter box of Russ’s cat.
Like I said at the outset, Aronofsky is an expert at delivering lead characters that come with a lot of emotional baggage, and Hank is no exception. The film makes it pretty clear in the first 15 minutes or so that while Hank, on the surface, seems to have accepted his life, he’s actually horribly depressed and completely unable to move on from his past. He’s a man who is constantly running from his problems, usually into copious bottles of alcohol. He’d rather drown himself in booze and get wasted than accept his actions. Hank is still ultimately a good person, mostly seen from how he calls his mom every day to talk about the San Francisco Giants and how he sends her money with each paycheck, but it’s clear he’s made plenty of bad mistakes he hasn’t come to terms with.
I love Hank as a main character. While I don’t think that Austin Butler will receive any recognition for the role come awards season, he plays Hank as a vulnerable and, frankly, relatable person. He admits when he’s scared, he cries, he goes nonverbal when the trauma of the situation becomes too much for him to bear, and even the characters acknowledge that Hank isn’t a killer. In a lesser movie, saying something like that is a corny cliché villains say when they’re cornered by the hero. Here, the film admits something we’ve known; Hank isn’t a bad person. There are aspects of Hank that I see in myself and that make him a more relatable Aronofsky protagonist than a perfectionist ballerina or a reclusive and morbidly obese deadbeat dad.
Copyright: Sony
I always view Aronofsky movies as character pieces, first and foremost, and while the tone and style of Caught Stealing is definitely on the lighter side, it’s still, at the end of the day, a character piece. The other characters are totally fine, with highlights being Regina King’s police detective, a Puerto Rican crime boss played by Bad Bunny, and a rock-solid Zoe Kravitz performance, but this is Butler’s show. The cast all play their parts well and interact with Butler in ways that force his character to grow and confront his own demons, whether they do so intentionally or not.
But there comes a point in the movie where things start to become a bit too complicated for its own good. Caught Stealing is ultimately a crime thriller, and when the focus shifts to the multifaceted gang warfare occurring, who’s allied with whom and why, things start to get a bit muddy. There’s a noticeable shift in the movie about halfway through when the film stops being about Austin Butler surviving the horrible situations he’s put in and starts to behave like a typical action thriller. There are gunfights, chase sequences, and big dramatic deaths that feel, for lack of a better word, cinematic. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
There’s a certain grit in the earlier scenes of Caught Stealing that really resonated with me. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Hank, after surviving an assault by some gangsters, goes to a bar trying to seek help. Instead, he gets completely wasted, and the next few minutes show him wallowing in self-pity, pushing Yvonne away, before eventually throwing up all over himself and passing out drunk on the floor. None of this is pretty to watch, mind you. It’s sad and is teeming with regret. But scenes like that feel incompatible with later scenes where Hank is fighting gangsters in an alley with his bare fists. It’s almost as if Aronofsky started making a movie in his style, but midway through, a studio executive walked on set and started giving notes to make it more of an action movie.
Copyright: Sony
That doesn’t make Caught Stealing bad, though. In fact, it becomes the kind of movie that the trailers were marketing. But, at the end of the day, it’s not as good as the first half. It’s fun and has a certain bit of righteous vengeance as we see Hank stand up for himself and take action, but Hank becomes less interesting because of it. He starts to feel like any other action hero in a crime thriller.
What keeps Caught Stealing somewhat interesting during these moments is the punk edge the film exudes. Maybe it’s because the film is set in the late ’90s, but I love the retro charm present. Usually, when we’re dealing with period pieces, there’s an attempt to try to rub it in the viewer’s face that the film isn’t set in modern times, but all the nods to ’90s culture feel natural. Hank uses payphones to call his mom, and even when he uses a cellphone, characters will tell him not to waste their minutes. Fat TVs are in every room. There’s a certain level of grime present in NYC that feels more reminiscent of its seedier past, and I’m almost certain I saw an N64 in Hank’s apartment. The NYC of Caught Stealing feels authentic and lived in, even if it doesn’t quite come across as its own character.
Even if I’m a bit disappointed at the more action-oriented direction the second half of the movie takes, I don’t think it’s bad in any definition of the word. I’ve been ambivalent towards most of the major releases this summer, but Caught Stealing was the first movie I’ve seen in weeks that has a sense of identity. It has a pulse and isn’t afraid to be dark, which is exactly what I want out of an Aronofsky movie. The cast delivers, and even if some characters are barely present, the fact that they’re all in service of an excellent Austin Butler performance is acceptable. With a fall season that’s stacked with new movies by some of the greatest directors of the 21st century, I’m happy to see that Aronofsky is among them and leading us into what will hopefully be four months of top-tier cinema.
