What is Darren Aronofsky on? We last met him directing Brendan Fraser to an Oscar in the allegedly manipulative The Whale. (Didn’t manipulate me.) Before that the insanely splendid Mother! Before that Russell Crowe as Noah. There is never any telling what direction he is heading.
You could argue that Caught Stealing is the director at his most conventional. If we were being unkind we would compare it with the various substandard Quentin Tarantino rip-offs that came our way in the 1990s.
But it’s better than that. Like all the director’s films, it never allows a boring shot when an unusual one is possible. It has compelling momentum. It features charismatic actors. What a shame it is so tonally chaotic.
Austin Butler, the most convincing leading man of the age, plays Hank, a barman, once a promising baseball player, working in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1990s. His neighbour, a Mohawk punk played by Matt Smith, asks the handsome streak of muscle to mind his cat when he goes to visit an ailing dad in England.
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The litter tray has barely been soiled before comic villains of various ethnic hue – bald Ukrainians, machine-gun toting Orthodox Jews – have come battering on Hank’s door.
There are a great many familiar tropes here. One thinks a little of Hitchcock’s “you’ve got the wrong man” thrillers. There is that post-Tarantino strain. By casting Griffin Dunne as the owner of the bar where Hank works, Aronofsky points us towards that actor’s night of New York hell in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, from 1985.
So what’s new? Nostalgia, for starters. Aronofsky is not exactly celebrating a vanished New York. The streets still look surprisingly similar. Oddballs still drift downtown. But he is having fun pointing up the trivial oddities that have gone missing. There are mobile phones about, but nobody is using them as a map.
The director makes no attempt at realism. The central couple – Zoë Kravitz is sharp as Hank’s squeeze – are, in their way, as glamorous as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. The villains are straight out of Dick Tracy.
So what’s the problem? We can’t really say without spoiling. But, about a third of the way in, something happens that should change the whole flavour of the film but just doesn’t. It stays about as much fun as something can while making no sense at all.
In cinemas from Friday, August 29th
