With each new movie, Austin Butler continues to impress and surprise me a little bit more, and in the hands of Darren Aronofsky (The Whale, Black Swan, The Wrestler) and their new film Caught Stealing, Butler has never been a more fascinating and layered performer.
Even in a supporting role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, he was terrifying and incredibly memorable. Even in Baz Luhrmann’s deeply flawed Elvis, Butler played the King convincingly. After a strong central performance in The Bikeriders, Butler doubled down on the psychotic as Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two.
But paired with Aronofsky, the actor is required to be different things depending on the scene and who he’s playing opposite. He’s the sexiest ex-baseball player who ever was; he’s a murderous/protective cat owner; and he has to outsmart the some obscenely smart (and quite sociopathic) gangsters, sometimes doing two or three of those things in the same scene.
In Caught Stealing, Butler plays high school baseball phenom Hank Thompson, who was injured in a car accident just when he had everything going for him and his future was looking so bright. The incident haunts him for multiple reasons, but it starts him down a spiral where his head is only kept above water by a terrific, no-bullshit girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). He’s also kept elevated by his mother (whom he talks to on the phone religiously every day) and their shared love of the New York Mets.
Coming home from work one night, Hank finds his British punk rock neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) at his door asking if he’ll take care of his cat Bud so Russ can return home to spend time with his dying father. Hank reluctantly agrees, and this somehow begins a torrential downpour of violence-inclined gangsters showing up looking for Russ—and beating up Hank to find out where he is. There are Russians, a Puerto Rican badass named Colorado (Bad Bunny, aka Benito Martinez Ocasio), a cop (Regina King) who’s convinced Hank is part of all of this, and a pair of Hasidic brothers (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), who love their mother (Carol Kane) but are easily the most dangerous of the bunch. They all seem to looking for something, and Hank has no idea what it is until he takes the initiative to find out exactly what’s going on before the body count reaches his front door. All the while, Hank is coping with the consequences of his car wreck, both to himself and to a close friend.
With a screenplay by Charlie Huston (based on his 2005 novel of the same name), Caught Stealing manages to walk that fine line between screamingly funny and hopelessly tragic without feeling like it’s tonally schizophrenic. Normally in a film like this, the plot doesn’t really matter since it’s all about being ripped through this wild group of characters, but Aronofsky takes the time to make certain the story is as clear as possible. And while I wouldn’t say the end wraps up everything nice and tidy, it does seem appropriate to everything that has come before, with everyone getting exactly what they deserve.
Aronofsky has never worked in this playful a sandbox before (I can’t recall a previous movie of his where I laughed as much, except maybe Noah). The body count is pretty high, and the blood count is significant and sometimes extremely graphic—brace yourself, but don’t let it keep you from seeing the movie. Caught Stealing is more akin to the Coen Brothers style of filmmaking, but with noticeable Aronofsky flourishes. He’s going for an emotionally driven crime drama and action film, and almost all of it works shockingly well. A great deal of that is because Austin Butler is an actor whose limits we are still discovering.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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