September 10, 2025
It was 1998. Henry "Hank" Thompson (Austin Butler) was a bartender living in an apartment in the Lower East Side of New York City, with his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz). One day, Hank's mohawked neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) left his cat Bud for Hank to take care of while he went to London. Soon after, two Russian mobsters Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) came around and beat Hank up so badly that it cost him a kidney.
Police narcotics detective Elise Roman (Regina King) came over to Hank's apartment to interrogate him. She also told him that his friend Russ was actually dealing for a pair of Hasidic Jew drug lords Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D'Onofrio) Drukcer. Hank soon discovered that Russ has hidden something in Bud's kitty litter box. When the bad guys found out about his possession of the item, everyone was now going after Hank.
"Caught Stealing" is a 2004 crime novel written by Charlie Huston, following the adventures of its first-person narrator, Hank Thompson, a former baseball-player (a serious knee injury sidelined his budding career) and current bartender who got involved with various dangerous criminals. Hank was very close to his mother, whom he called daily in her California home. This book eventually had two sequels, "Six Bad Things" and "A Dangerous Man."
After mesmerizing the world with his transformation into Elvis Presley in "Elvis" (2022), Austin Butler got down and very dirty this time (there was a scene of him trying to unjam a blocked up toilet with a plunger) as a young man whose life went terribly awry after he agreed to take care of a neighbor's cat. He showed amazing form in that scene where he was batting a barrage of baseballs in a cage. Hank was an alcoholic but he did not have a beer belly to show for it.
This film got my attention mostly because it was directed by Darren Aronofsky. Ever since his big critically-acclaimed breakthrough "Requiem for a Dream" (2000), his subsequent films like "The Wrestler" (2008), "Black Swan" (2008) and "The Whale" (2022) also garnered Oscar love, even winning the big prize for two of his lead actors. Even if it is also a deep but darkly comic character study, this must be Aronofsky's lighter, more accessible films. 8/10
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