The cat in the spat.

There’s an absurdist undercurrent to Caught Stealing that clings to events like dried vomit on a subway tile. It’s not loud or wacky, but it’s there – threaded through the choices characters make and the way events turn and start to spiral out of control. All because someone reluctantly agreed to feed his neighbour’s cat.

Austin Butler leads with a performance that shines with big screen charisma, his easy-going bartender with a tragic past and thwarted ambitions is immediately likeable and easy to root for, especially as events force into near cornered-animal desperation. His Hank isn’t some kind of streetwise genius, and he often seems just clever enough to make the wrong decision nearly every time it matters. But through each escalation and turn, he cuts an empathetic figure and his refusal to be cowed by each beatdown endears him to us despite the terrible collateral damage left in his wake. The violence is sharp, brutal and matter of fact, but the context is often darkly amusing, but only in a way that makes you flinch. It’s never quite clear who’s in control of events and Caught Stealing has a lot of fun with shifting alliances, betrayals, reveals and double-crosses as it ups the ante.

It helps that Butler is surrounded by a stellar cast who are clearly enjoying themselves, revelling in the chaos. Regina King plays her detective with such hard-edged precision you half expect her to solve the whole thing in five minutes and arrest the director as an accessory while Zoë Kravitz makes a sharp impression in her limited but impactful screen time as does Benito “Bad Bunny” Martínez Ocasio delivers another great cameo as Colorado, the inept handler of two feral – and often hilarious – Russian henchmen. But it’s Matt Smith, Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber who almost steal the picture out from everyone else, the former as an affably profane punk expat who gets himself and, inadvertently Butler’s Hank, mixed up in a gang war over drug money, while D’Onofrio and Schreiber bring the Hasidic Drucker brothers a Talmudic intensity and orthodox civility that manages to be both terrifying and faintly ridiculous. Even the Tonic, as Bud the cat, understands the assignment. Everyone commits, but everyone winks.

Adapted by Charlie Huston from his own novel, Caught Stealing‘s noir sensibilities just about hold even as the plot slips around on blood, loose teeth, and poor judgement. There’s a tension to the piece like the script is playing a game of chicken between crime thriller and farce, with neither genre looking like it’ll flinch.

For all its character quirkiness, Caught Stealing represents Darren Aronofsky’s most straightforward and dare I say accessible film to date. Gone are the spirals of Requiem for a Dream, the spiritual double helix of The Fountain or the operatic mania of Black Swan. Here, he trades thematic convolution for linear propulsion. It’s Aronofsky embracing pulp, but not as parody. Aronofsky isn’t taking it easy, he’s borrowing Shane Black’s 1990s playbook and giving it a twenty-first century glow-up (grime-down?) and the end result is a slick, sardonic triumph.