Set in 1998, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is an elegy for a vanished New York – one driven by diverse inner city neighbourhoods, affordable apartment and housing prices, and the rich melting-pot of cultural voices on the cusp of the millennium. Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a baseballer-turned-bartender who finds himself caught up in a criminal conspiracy that encompasses corrupt cops, the Russian Mafia and the darkest, most bizarre reaches of the Jewish underground. While it’s tragic and horrific in equal measure, the pervasive register is the inane anarchic energy of the 90s hang-out film; the presence of Matt Smith as an aging punk strikes a distinct note with Cool Brittannia in particular, invoking films like Human Traffic and Trainspotting that envisaged cinema as a queasy high. As a result, a distinct note of absurdity percolates through the film, epitomised by the neighbour’s cat that sets the narrative in motion, and who accompanies Hank on his journey through the recesses of New York City’s crime cultures. Even the pathos-laden moment that formed Hank’s character, the car crash that killed his best friend and caused the knee injury that forced him to retire from professional baseball, is couched in the same absurd sense of mise-en-scene; the cow that caused the crash looks on impassively at the aftermath.

More specifically, Caught Stealing is an elegy for the public sphere generated by the vestibules, lobbies and other shared spaces of inner-city living in the late 90s. Hank and his girlfriend Yvonne, played by Zoe Kravitz, regularly make out in the vestibule of his apartment, forcing residents to edge and squeeze past them, and the crime narrative emerges from the incongruous contiguities of his first-floor landing, which opens up onto residences rented or owned by the full spectrum of New Yorkers from punks to upwardly mobile professionals. This is a neighborhood that has started to gentrify but is still suffused with gritty and grotty textures, such as the key that Hank discovers concealed in a fake poop in his neighbour’s cat litter just after flushing out his own overflowing toilet, a scatological diptych that ends up being the foundational moment in the crime narrative. The same grottiness extends to the human body, as evinced in Smith’s mohawk and piercings, as well as the storage unit where Hank discovers a cash stash decked out in a lifetime’s worth of punk gear, albums and memorabilia, like a time capsule of a smaller, even more squalid generation of inner city living. In that sense, Caught Stealing is both a tribute to the late 90s and to classic punk as the moment when urban decay and desuetude were rediscovered as a site of cultural rebellion.

Of course, Caught Stealing takes place as the unthinkable is occurring – the punk spirit is being gentrified – and this ushers in Aronofsky’s trademark apocalyptic affect. For Caught Stealing is set in the same year as Pi, Aronofsky’s breakout debut, and is just as much a vision of millennium approaching, although in a quite different way. We see this element of the film first and foremost in its Judeo-Christian sense of the flesh as an impediment to be overcome. This has always been a component of Aronofsky’s vision, from the blindness-vision of Pi to the drug addiction of Requiem for a Dream to the body horror of Black Swan to the self-discipline of The Wrestler, but it took on a more explicit apocalyptic quality in The Whale, where the protagonist’s effort to traverse his enormous obesity acted as a literal harbinger of the end times. That same embodied intensity continues into Caught Stealing, which plays as a single chase scene in which Hank is faced with endless obstacles to his body – he is always getting tripped up, falling over, in pain, as he negotiates corridors and alleys that seems to become shorter, narrower, more tortuous. The fact of his knee injury, which meant he could bat but never run as a baseballer, adds to this agonising quality, until his body itself turns into an obstacle that needs to be transcended and traversed.

At the same time, Aronofsky floods the film with an apocalyptic temporality in which time itself seems to be accelerating towards an eschatological singularity. As the stakes of the criminal conspiracy skyrocket, Hank is forced to shed so many people in his life (girlfriend, neighbour, employer, friend) that he feels on the cusp of transfiguration – if he can just make it to the future. Time and again, he wakes up shocked, disoriented, barely himself, gesturing towards an imminent awakening that he glimpses most vividly when he comes to consciousness to find himself standing in the sand at Brighton Beach, water lapping at his feet. And this eschatology is ultimately Jewish – a pair of Jewish hitmen form the last of the film’s escalating arcane criminal networks, and performing an ongoing liturgy revolving around the refrains “sad world” and “broken world.” By stripping Hank naked, and speculating as to whether they should cut his eyes out, they provide him with both the most occult image in the film and his greatest impetus to stay one step ahead of his body, or else transcend it altogether, to avoid the embodied apocalypse that appears to be coming. 

Sure enough, when Hank does finally “escape,” it is not merely to another place but to a different paradigm of place – the beachside resort of Tulum, Mexico, which is so different in tone and texture from the rest of the film (the only cognate is the Brighton Beach shore) that it feels entirely hypothetical, like the beach scene at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. The last we see of New York before Tulum is the final showdown in the interstitial zones between Brighton Beach tenements and the incongruity between these two closing spaces makes it feel like Aronofsky is reflecting, with the hindsight of a quarter of a century, on what was actually at the stake in the apocalyptic turn of the millennium: the disappearance of public space, of physical community, of cinema as a way of registering these phenomena (twenty-five years ago, this film would have sold out theatre but it feels strangely adrift in the mid-2020s). And for all its pristine beauty, Tulum doesn’t have the one thing that links every other part of the film – baseball. For, while Hank may have lost his future as a baseball career, baseball talk is the common denominator across every subculture he counters.  No matter where we are in this exotic cross-section of New York, people always come back to baseball, a common language, a demotic surrogate for cinema, that both Aronofsky and Hank are forced to leave behind amidst the airbrushed irreality of the closing shots.