FILM OF THE WEEK Caught Stealing - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is that rare thing in his filmography, a movie that wears the clothes of a scrappy New York crime caper yet can’t quite resist the director’s instinct to tip the balance from grim realism into something approaching comic-book absurdity. What results is a film that is undeniably fun in its energy and unpredictability but one that lurches unevenly between tones, as though uncertain whether to grin at its own pulp conceit or brood over the wounds of its hapless protagonist.

Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a washed-up ballplayer turned bartender whose days are measured in shots poured and games watched rather than anything resembling purpose. Butler, compelling in Elvis, Dune: Part Two and The Bikeriders, holds the film together with a kind of laid-back magnetism that suggests both the broken athlete he once was and the reluctant hero he is forced to become when he becomes the target of every warring faction in New York. When his drug-dealing punk neighbour Russ (Matt Smith) asks Hank to mind his cat for a few days, the feline attracts the attention of every criminal in town, who arrive at Hank's doorstep looking for Russ, who has skipped town. Things rapidly escalate. It's to Bulter's credit that even when the narrative careens from bloody kidney theft to slapstick farce, Hank remains sympathetic with Butler impressing in moments of physical action and the quieter, close-up interludes that remind us Aronofsky, even here, remains fascinated by faces in crisis.

The world around Hank is populated with an almost vaudevillian gallery of villains and allies, from Zoë Kravitz’s underused paramedic girlfriend, who feels like she belongs to a different, straighter film, to Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Orthodox brothers rendered as both grotesque and comedic, to Bad Bunny in an eccentric cameo that plays like a parody of gangster swagger. There are moments when the film seems to aspire toward the manic loopiness of a Guy Ritchie ensemble, moments when it echoes Scorsese with its sense of New York as a labyrinth of misadventures, and moments when Aronofsky cannot resist slipping back toward the bodily horror and wounded psychology that have marked so much of his work.

Charlie Huston’s screenplay, adapted from his own novel, provides the scaffolding for this madcap descent, and while it gives Aronofsky license to indulge both his eye for urban grit and his taste for violent spectacle, it also exposes the director’s unease with comedy. A scene that plays like a grotesque joke about organ theft sits uneasily next to one in which Butler cradles a cat with unexpected tenderness, and a brutal shootout that leaves the floor slick with blood is treated with the same verve as a Looney Tunes gag. The tonal whiplash is deliberate, one suspects, but it often works against the film’s momentum, turning what might have been a gleeful genre exercise into something more jagged, more self-conscious, less sure of its own pleasures.

Still, there is a pulse of enjoyment running through Caught Stealing that cannot be denied, a sense that Aronofsky - long associated with high seriousness, with damaged souls in pursuit of transcendence or self-destruction - is letting himself play, albeit in a register that he cannot quite sustain without falling back into old habits. The film’s New York, lovingly rendered by Matthew Libatique’s cinematography, is both a playground of menace and a nostalgic postcard of a city not yet swallowed by gentrification. Within it, Butler strides, stumbles, fights, drinks, and occasionally dazzles, ever compelling even when the film around him falters.

The result is a caper that is stylish, violent, intermittently hilarious, often excessive, and, for all its tonal instability, strangely entertaining, if somewhat forgettable.
But give the cat all the awards.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Written by Charlie Huston. Cinematography by Matthew Libatique.

Starring Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Griffin Dunne, Carol Kane. 107 mins

• In cinemas August 29