The trailer has arrived for Caught Stealing, and it looks like Black Swan and The Whale filmmaker Darren Aronofsky is trading operatic dread for black comedy and pulp violence. Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, and Matt Smith are in the cast of this one. Take a look above.
Based on Charlie Huston’s 2004 crime novel of the same name, the film has Butler playing Hank Thompson, a washed-up baseball player turned dive bar bartender who somehow finds himself being hunted by a crew of increasingly unhinged criminals. What begins with his neighbour (Smith) asking him to look after a cat turns into a full-blown survival sprint through the criminal underworld. Not helping matters: a mysterious duffel bag, Kravitz as Hank’s girlfriend, and a supporting cast of crooks, cops, and weirdos played by the likes of Regina King, Vincent D’Onofrio, Liev Schreiber, and Bad Bunny.
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The trailer is a burst of grit and style, with Butler in bruised, deadpan mode as he’s forced to scramble, punch, and improvise his way out of a mess he never saw coming.
Aronofsky, who debuted footage at CinemaCon earlier this year, called the film “something different” and described it as “a true love letter to the greatest city in the world” — his hometown, New York. “I wanted to do something that was a lot of fun,” the filmmaker said. It certainly marks a change of pace for Aronofsky, whose credits are primarily made up of more downbeat, tragic, experimental projects.
Huston wrote the screenplay, adapting his own novel. The film reunites Aronofsky with Matthew Libatique, the Black Swan and A Star is Born cinematographer who lensed Aronofsky’s first feature film, Pi, and editor Andrew Weisblum (Black Swan, Mother, The French Dispatch).
Caught Stealing opens in Australian cinemas on August 28 and in the U.S. on August 29.
