Watching a neighbor’s cat turns lethal in ‘Caught Stealing’

I have enjoyed many films directed by Darren Aronofsky, even the ones whose titles alone can trigger stomach-turning images of flesh being mutilated or pulverized.

With Black Swan, the first thing I think of is Natalie Portman peeling away the skin from her fingers. With The Wrestler, it’s Mickey Rourke mishandling a meat slicer. Thankfully, I have only vague memories of Jared Leto‘s gangrenous arm from Requiem for a Dream. In movie after movie, including the recent Brendan Fraser-starring drama The Whale, Aronofsky delights in pushing the human body to extremes of physical and sometimes spiritual endurance.

By his grisly standards, the darkly funny crime thriller Caught Stealing comes across as a lighter affair, even though it has a sky-high body count and its protagonist loses a kidney in the first half-hour. The movie, which was adapted by Charlie Huston from his own 2014 novel, takes place in New York in 1998. It begins with a shot of the Twin Towers, and there’s an early reference to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s draconian crackdowns on local nightlife.

Austin Butler stars as Hank Thompson, who works at an East Village dive bar, lives in a grimy apartment and has a girlfriend, Yvonne, played by a good if frustratingly sidelined Zoë Kravitz. Yvonne is a paramedic, which comes in handy soon enough.

One day, Hank’s next-door neighbor, Russ — that’s Matt Smith, with a fiery orange Mohawk — has to leave town due to a family emergency and persuades a reluctant Hank to watch his cat. Nothing good comes of this.

Before long, two Russian-speaking mobsters show up at Russ’ door, demanding to know where he is. They take their aggression out on Hank, beating him so badly that he winds up in the hospital.

After the assault, Hank calls the police. A detective named Elise Roman, sharply played by Regina King, shows him a photo of two other men snooping around the area. The men are both Ultra-Orthodox Jews — it took me a second to recognize the actors, Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio — and Detective Roman warns Hank that they’re also extremely dangerous killers.

Before long, Hank finds himself caught up in a messy plot involving a missing key, a lot of guns and a few million dollars in cash. Many desperate chases ensue, and Aronofsky stages them with undeniable verve, whether Hank is racing through a crowded fish market or being pursued around the scenic Flushing Meadows in Queens, complete with a detour through Shea Stadium.

Aronofsky was raised in Brooklyn but later lived in the East Village, and you can feel his affection for the grungy late-’90s New York he’s recreated here; there are even shots of iconic neighborhood fixtures like Kim’s Video. You can practically see the city seething in every frame shot by Aronofsky’s longtime cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, who’s a hugely versatile talent; he also filmed the summer’s other sweatily atmospheric New York crime thriller, Highest 2 Lowest.

As a funny, bloody valentine to the city during a bygone era, Caught Stealing is awfully engrossing, though I can’t say that its mix of rambunctious slapstick and bone-crunching violence always gels. When it comes to his villains, Aronofsky plays broadly with cultural stereotypes, sometimes spinning them in outlandishly violent directions. And the movie nearly loses you early on with a nasty twist that feels too callous by half.

Butler is a terrific actor, as we’ve seen from his commanding star turn in Elvis and his otherworldly villainy in Dune: Part Two. He does something very different here: He plays a hard-drinking screw-up with an air of sweetness, even innocence, about him.

The title Caught Stealing nods to the fact that Hank was once a promising baseball player, until a terrible mistake cut short his athletic dreams and doomed him to the life he’s currently leading. Aronofsky often flashes back to that tragedy, to underscore how little control Hank has had over his destiny, and also to set him up for a thrilling comeback. Butler makes Hank easy enough to root for, even if the movie itself, for all its cheerfully disreputable pleasures, ultimately plays like minor-league Aronofsky.