Watching Caught Stealing is like being smacked in the face by a baseball bat and asking for more. Darren Aronofsky’s blood-splattered love letter to 90s New York echoes with that very specific metallic ping, a homerun of dark nostalgia sailing out of the theatre away from the horrific normalisation of Trump’s American autocracy.
Austin Butler’s golden boy persona as Henry ‘Hank’ Thompson is given a dark tweak, he’s a haunted high school baseball phenom surrounded by an eclectic menagerie of characters last found in those subpar post-Tarantino 90s flicks: a British punk, Russian mobsters, Hasidic gangsters, a Puerto Rican drug dealer, tough cops, and a Hell’s Angel bar owner.
If they sound like the start to a bad 90s joke that would be cancelled now, Hank isn’t laughing.
According to Trump sycophant Stephen Miller on Fox News, Aronofsky’s rogue gallery could be friends of the Democrat Party after Miller described them as being devoted “exclusively to the defence of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists”.
Even Trump’s pathetic legal stooge Rudy Giuliani is referenced in Caught Stealing when, as mayor of New York, he implemented his broken window policy to clean up the streets and threatened the Cabaret Law banning people from dancing in unlicensed premises.
Hank is a decade in New York, but he isn’t a New Yorker. He’s an amiable character who sees the good in his local bum, parties hard in the bar he works in, and reluctantly looks after his punk neighbour Russ’ cat. It’s the worst decision of his life leaving him with life-changing injuries after a horrific beating from the Russian mobsters looking for a shit load of cash.
Now Hank is embroiled in a Guy Ritchie caper that’ll kill him quicker than a Gil Hodges homerun.
Aronofsky likes to disfigure his A-list pretty boys, just look at the state of Jared Leto’s heroin addict Harry at the end of the director’s sophomore masterpiece Requiem for a Dream – although it’s a close-run thing with the state of Leto’s face in Fight Club.
Hank wakes up a brutalised mess, too broke to stay in hospital a minute longer than necessary but his quick wits and athletic ability might just keep him safe at the plate. And, unlike Harry, he’s not contending with smack as his drug of choice.
Caught Stealing revels in The Fragility of Hope that infects so many of Aronofsky’s characters and is the title of Jadranka Skorin-Kapov’s excellent analysis of the director’s oeuvre. Skorin-Kapov’s explains, “both obsession and addiction, extreme mental states characterizing distorted interiority that can lead to external bodily distortions” are rampant throughout his films.
It’s an escape from the fascist ICE raids of Trump’s fledgling dictatorship, or the cheap flags reminiscent of the National Front in this country; draped in the name of patriotism but symbolising so much more
Harry is obsessed with his tragic past and baseball – specifically the San Francisco Giants – and is addicted to booze and in some ways his past trauma.
Henry’s fragile glimmer of fragile hope is his soon-to-be significant other Yvonne, who works as a paramedic. Yvonne, as played by Zoë Kravitz, is one of the all-time movie girlfriends, an absolute force of nature, and an absolute force for good in Henry’s Lower East Side malaise. Their relationship is hot, sexy and horny, messy, complicated and touching.
When she steps out of the movie, we’re bereft, it’s as cataclysmic as the fall of Rome.
But what Caught Stealing really is, even more than a great genre movie directed by an auteur director kind of slumming it, or a great star performance from Butler in the mould of Paul Newman or Brad Pitt, or a kick-ass soundtrack that features Madonna’s Ray of Light and Bowie’s I’m Afraid of Americans, is a time machine, an escape capsule to the 90s where cinema was still daring, the indies were king, and New York was in that sweet spot before gentrification turned parts of The Big Apple into a sanitised version of itself.
It’s an escape from the fascist ICE raids of Trump’s fledgling dictatorship, or the cheap flags reminiscent of the National Front in this country; draped in the name of patriotism but symbolising so much more. From that fuck face Farage and all the damage he has done.
All we can do is look at the blank television screen with Hank as he decides his future, listen to the sea lapping at the shore, and cling to the fragility of his – and our – hope that our lives will get back to some semblance of normality.