TL;DR: Aronofsky made a Scorsese-style crime thriller about Austin Butler losing a kidney, dodging gangsters, and caring for a cat. It’s grim, funny, and deeply messy — but a ride worth taking.

The Unlikely Playfulness of Darren Aronofsky

Some directors settle into a groove so predictable you could storyboard their next movie in your sleep. Darren Aronofsky has never been that guy. He’s the human equivalent of a film school fever dream: oscillating between operatic allegories, brutal chamber pieces, and the occasional Biblical flood. Fifteen years post–Black Swan, he’s made Brendan Fraser cry his way to an Oscar, unleashed Jennifer Lawrence on a house of nightmares, and even hijacked Vegas’s Sphere for a sensory experiment. The throughline? Obsession and addiction — usually destructive, never tidy. Which is why Caught Stealing, his new cat-sitting-gone-wrong crime comedy, feels both jarringly off-brand and completely inevitable.

Baseball Dreams, Lost Kidneys, and One Very Important Cat

The premise is deceptively light, almost sitcom-simple. Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a washed-up ex–ball player who now spends his nights bartending in late-90s Lower East Side grime and his mornings passed out in Zoë Kravitz’s apartment. Hank’s life is a truce with trauma: booze, baseball scores, denial. Then Russ, his mohawked neighbor (Matt Smith), skips town and dumps his cat on Hank. That’s the trigger for everything. Suddenly Hank is missing a kidney, dodging Russian thugs, being chased by Orthodox gangster brothers, and crossing paths with Bad Bunny in full gangster mode — all while still making sure the cat gets fed. It’s absurd, violent, and darkly hilarious, a downward spiral dressed as a screwball.

Aronofsky in Scorsese Mode

What’s wild here is watching Aronofsky actually have fun. Not Marvel quip-fest fun — grimy, razor-edged fun. The city is alive with menace: sticky bar floors, Giuliani-era grit, neon puddles glowing under streetlamps. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique films the dirt like it’s contagious. Yet there’s buoyancy. The end credits scatter and dance to music; bar scenes thrum with late-90s bangers. This isn’t Aronofsky abandoning his obsessions so much as refracting them through a Scorsesean filter. After Hours hangs over the whole thing — Griffin Dunne even pops up as a wink to the audience — but instead of imitation, it feels like homage spliced with Aronofsky’s addiction-addled DNA.

Obsession Never Lets Go

Make no mistake: this is still an Aronofsky story. Hank is told, post-kidney theft, that he can’t drink again. Of course, he drinks. That defiance in the face of self-preservation is the heartbeat of Aronofsky’s filmography. Black Swan had perfectionism, The Wrestler had relevance, Requiem for a Dream had, well, everything. Hank has alcohol and avoidance. Obsession always wins. It’s the same tragic cycle, only here it plays out with more absurd detours — a man bleeding in an alley one second, feeding a cat the next.

Austin Butler, Certified Star

Let’s be honest: Butler had every chance to become just “that Elvis guy.” Instead, he’s stacked his post-Oscar career with roles that flex range instead of ego. Here, he’s magnetic. You buy him as a tragic antihero and as the unlucky everyman scrambling through back alleys. He makes you root for him even when the universe — and every gangster in New York — wants him dead. Kravitz is his anchor, sparking with him in a way that’s sexy and tender without ever feeling written by committee. And the rest of the ensemble? Delicious chaos. Matt Smith’s Russ is pure punk chaos, Regina King’s detective keeps shifting masks, Schreiber and D’Onofrio’s gangster brothers veer between hilarious and horrifying, and yes, Bad Bunny proves he can menace as well as headline a stadium.

Messy, Grim, and Exhilarating

Is it flawless? No. The plot sometimes threatens to collapse under its own spirals. Certain side characters teeter on caricature. And balancing humor with gut-punch violence is a tightrope not everyone will love watching walked. But honestly, that messiness is the point. Caught Stealing is about chaos breaking through the smallest cracks — in this case, cat-sitting. It should feel unstable. It should feel like you’re one drink away from disaster.

The Final Word

Caught Stealing isn’t Aronofsky softening up. It’s him loosening the screws and seeing what happens when his obsessions collide with pulp crime storytelling. The result? A bruised, grimy, funny-as-hell Scorsesean caper with its own cracked heartbeat. Not everyone will love it. But for those who do, it’s the rare Aronofsky film that actually makes you laugh while still making you wince.

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