Caught Stealing

I had the house to myself last night and decided I’d watch this recent Austin Butler film because I’ve become quite the Austin Butler fan. I vaguely recall reading a review of this movie when it came out, but I’d completely forgotten about the film, so it obviously didn’t set the world on fire. Still, there was something about it that made me think it might be worth a couple of hours of my time.

It was. To very briefly summarise the plot, Butler plays a former baseball player whe had the world at his feet, and then he fucked it all up. I won’t give away any spoilers about how, because it’s kind of an important thread in the film. He ends up tending bar in NY, where he seems to be the life of the party every night, but you can see his trajectory is going all the way down.

The film is set in New York in the late 1990s as the changes to policing and city government under Rudy Giuliani are beginning to transform the broken urban environment of the previous 20 years. There are occasional mentions of gentrification, but Butler’s dive bar is in a rough part of the inner city.

I really enjoyed the feeling that this was a story from the “Before Times.” Nobody had a mobile phone, there was no social media, everything was analog and gritty, and there was a huge amount of friction to doing everything. Because the city is rapidly gentrifying, the crims are all looking for ways to get a piece of the action even as the city moves away from them and the action changes.

I don’t want to say too much more about the plot because it is enjoyably complicated, much like the early Tarantino pieces.

The cast is fantastic. Besides Butler, you get my third favourite Doctor Who, Matt Smith, as a full-on, late-stage punk who tips Butler’s well-meaning bartender into the criminal underworld by insisting the bartender mind his cat while Smith flies back to London to visit his dying father. Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber appear as Hasidic Jewish gangsters and threaten to steal the whole film. The whole cast is awesome. Even the cat.

The whole thing is awesome, really. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, it was one of the more enjoyable cinema experiences I’ve had recently, partly because it felt a bit like time travel, but also because I recognised the form of this story. It’s a movie I’ve watched 20 or 30 times before. The best way to shorthand it is to say it’s the John Wick hero’s journey: a guy just trying to live a normal life runs afoul of criminal elements, and violent hilarity ensues. This is the John Wick Universe, which is also the Jason Statham Universe, and before that, the Arnold Schwarzenegger Universe, and even, God help us, the Steven Seagal Universe.

The protagonist in these stories is always blessed with some near-magical arcane skillset that allows him to dismantle the criminal enterprise of which he has run afoul. Caught Stealing, however, is much more realistic. Butler’s character has no arcane skills beyond his ability to swing a baseball bat, and don’t for a second imagine that’s gonna make him a minor Marvel superhero carving a path through the underworld with his improvised wooden club. It’s not.

Butler’s a great everyman actor, and part of the appeal of this film is watching him just not cope for most of it, the way the rest of us wouldn’t either, until he finally reaches a place where not coping is no longer an option.

It’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime, but if you are not in the habit of giving Bezos your credit card number, you could probably rent it on iTunes or one of the other platforms.