Austin Butler trades Elvis for an ultra-violent gangster farce

CAUGHT STEALING
★★★★
MA, 106 minutes. In cinemas

Caught Stealing is a high-speed tour of the sleazier sections of New York’s Lower East side led by Hank Thompson, played by Austin Butler, best known for his lead role in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. This time, he’s on the run from a formidable assortment of gangsters.

Three ethnic groups are represented. According to Hank’s neighbour, Russ, who got him into this mess, “the Russians, the Hebrews” and a Colombian fixer all want what he’s got. As a result, Hank is in continuous motion. At one point he executes a sprint marathon which puts Tom Cruise to shame.

Russ is played by British actor, Matt Smith, looking very different from his incarnation as the Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown. Sporting a multi-coloured Mohawk, he looks and sounds like a Cockney punk rocker, but his true vocation is drug-dealing, and he’s not fussy about the quality of his associates. He does have one or two likeable features, however. He’s very fond of his cat, Bud, a poised, long-haired tabby who steals every scene he’s in. Forced to make an urgent trip back to his home in England, Russ enlists Hank as a cat-sitter and that’s where the trouble starts.

The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, a filmmaker celebrated for being up for anything and for his ability to create and maintain a sense of nightmarish intensity. His last film, The Whale, won Brendan Fraser a Best Actor Oscar and his ballet picture, The Black Swan, scored five Oscar nominations.

In this one, he reveals his taste for black farce, along with a flair for choreographing stunt work. The hyperactive script is by Charlie Huston, who has adapted his own novel. Set in millennial New York, it’s the first in a trilogy about Hank, a former baseball prodigy whose career was derailed by a bone-breaking accident followed by a car crash which killed his best friend. Since then, he’s been devoid of all ambition, content to drift along in his pokey apartment in the East Village, working as a bartender. Alcohol helps, and he has a smart, sexy girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz), who loves him.

He’s a companionable narrative guide and he really knows how to take a beating. The Russians launch hostilities by putting him in hospital with a ruptured kidney. And there are many more injuries to come, yet against all probability, he keeps running while showing no hint of self-pity. When he sheds a tear – as he often does – it’s for the people who become collateral damage because they’re close to him.

The villains are cartoon mobsters and Aronofsky and Huston have a lot of fun with their eccentricities. The “Hebrew” crims, for instance, are two Jewish Orthodox brothers who take Hank home for their mother’s chicken soup with dumplings before deciding if they’re going to kill him. Their mother is played by Carol Kane, an early Woody Allen discovery who makes the most of every moment, but the film has so much bloodletting and the casualty rate is so high that its gallows humour tends to be upstaged by the ultra violence.

But there’s no looking away. It’s a wild ride and Hank is undergoing such a fundamental shift in his attitude and expectations that you’re with him to the end. I suppose you could call it a moral tale but in this world, the word “moral”, does not necessarily mean that you wind up on the right side of the law.

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