So, the guy who made us all sit through a six-hundred-pound man eating himself to death and a ballerina sprouting literal feathers just released a crime caper. If that sounds weird, it’s because it is. Darren Aronofsky’s newest film, Caught Stealing, hit theaters in late 2025 and is now tearing through the streaming charts, but it doesn't look like anything we expected from the "king of bleak."
Forget the psychological torture of Mother! for a second. In this one, we get Austin Butler, a very talented cat, and the Russian mob. It’s basically Aronofsky trying on a Guy Ritchie suit, and honestly? It mostly fits.
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What Is Caught Stealing Actually About?
The plot is deceptively simple. Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a former baseball prospect whose career ended in a messy car crash. Now, it's 1998, and he’s a tired bartender in New York’s Lower East Side. He’s just trying to survive his shifts when his neighbor asks him to cat-sit.
Worst mistake ever.
The neighbor, played by a mohawked Matt Smith, vanishes. Suddenly, Hank is being chased by Russian gangsters, corrupt cops, and a pair of Hasidic Jewish hitmen played by Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio. They all think Hank has a key to $4 million. He doesn't. Or at least, he doesn't know he does.
Why This Movie Is a Pivot
Most people know Aronofsky for "heavy" cinema. You go to his movies to feel bad, or at least to feel something intensely uncomfortable. But Caught Stealing is arguably his first "fun" movie. It’s got a 1990s Tarantino vibe—fast edits, needle drops (the soundtrack features the British punk band Idles), and a lot of dark humor.
It’s a love letter to a version of New York that doesn't really exist anymore. Think Mayor Giuliani-era grit, before the Lower East Side became a collection of juice bars.
The Austin Butler Transformation
We’ve seen Butler as Elvis and a hairless freak in Dune: Part Two. Here, he’s just... a guy. Aronofsky famously loves to break his actors down. He made Natalie Portman lose a frightening amount of weight for Black Swan and put Brendan Fraser under layers of prosthetics.
With Butler, the transformation is more internal. He plays Hank as a man who is perpetually "done." He gets beaten up—a lot. There’s a scene where he’s literally impaling a detective's foot with a broken baseball bat. It’s visceral, but it’s not the poetic suffering of his earlier work. It’s just survival.
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The Weirdest Parts You Might Have Missed
The movie is based on the book by Charlie Huston. If you’ve read it, you know it’s part of a trilogy. This means we might actually see an Aronofsky franchise, which is a wild sentence to type.
- The Cat: The cat’s name is Bud. He is arguably the most competent character in the film.
- The Cameos: Griffin Dunne shows up as a bar owner named Paul. This is a direct nod to the 1985 Scorsese film After Hours, which clearly inspired the "one crazy night in NYC" energy of this movie.
- The Violence: It’s rated R for a reason. People get shot, stabbed, and pummeled, but unlike Requiem for a Dream, the violence here feels like an action movie beat rather than a soul-crushing tragedy.
Is the Elon Musk Biopic Still Happening?
While everyone is talking about Caught Stealing, the "elephant in the room" is Aronofsky’s other project: the Elon Musk biopic.
A24 won a massive bidding war for the rights to Walter Isaacson’s biography. Reports from early 2026 suggest that Aronofsky is moving into production on this next. It’s a perfect fit for him. He loves obsessives. Whether it’s the mathematician in Pi or the wrestler in The Wrestler, he excels at showing people who destroy themselves for a goal.
There was a lot of "fancasting" for Kevin Durand to play Musk because they look like twins, but nothing is set in stone yet. What we do know is that Aronofsky is currently on a streak of making movies about men in small rooms (or bars) facing enormous consequences.
Why It Failed at the Box Office (But Won on Streaming)
Let's be real: the movie was a "bomb" in theaters. It cost around $45 million to $65 million to make and only pulled in about $32 million globally.
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Why? Because it’s a weird middle ground. It’s too "artsy" for the John Wick crowd and too "action-y" for the A24 crowd. But once it hit streaming in December 2025, it exploded. People realized that watching Austin Butler run around 90s New York with a cat is actually a great way to spend two hours.
What You Should Do Next
If you enjoyed the gritty, fast-paced world of Caught Stealing, your best bet is to dive into the source material. Charlie Huston’s "Hank Thompson" trilogy—starting with the book Caught Stealing and followed by Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man—gives a lot more internal monologue for Hank that the movie had to skip.
You should also keep an eye on the horror film Pendulum. Aronofsky didn't direct it, but he produced it, and it just got a "Bloody Violent" R-rating. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Phoebe Dynevor, and it seems to be carrying that dark, cultish energy that Caught Stealing traded for action.
The era of Aronofsky making "easy" movies might be over as he moves toward the Musk project, so enjoy this weird, violent detour while it's fresh.