Darren Aronofsky is known for his high concepts. Even when he doesn’t make films with obvious high concepts — a deep-dive into addiction (Requiem for a Dream), a retelling of the flooding of earth by a vengeful God (Noah), a woman unraveling with a half-dozen layers of metaphorical interpretation (mother!) — he’s still pretty much in high concept territory. Even Aronofsky’s “small” films deal with a has-been pro wrestler trying to stave off heart problems (The Wrestler) and a morbidly obese man, also trying to stave off heart problems (The Whale).

So it’s perhaps a slight disappointment in terms of our expectations when Aronofsky decides to make a movie that is merely a genre film. That’s an apt description of Caught Stealing, Charlie Huston‘s adaptation of his own book. This crime thriller with a comedic bent does have a few signature details that tiptoe towards the high concept, as well as remind us of films already mentioned in this review. The main character, played by Austin Butler, is a baseball player who never made it due to a devastating knee injury sustained in a car crash, and he also can no longer drink due to a ruptured kidney sustained in a severe beating at the hands of a couple goons looking for his neighbour, the gloriously mohawked Russ, played by Matt Smith. But really, this is a project whose ambition is comparatively small, really only out to entertain us — which, fortunately, it does quite well.

If you want to credit Aronofsky with one more gesture toward his usual high-wire acts, he’s set the film right around this time of year in 1998, in New York City, with the World Trade Center towers still pointedly appearing in the background of a number of shots. Although Caught Stealing definitely calls attention to its time and place, over and over again, it doesn’t ever feel less than 100% authentic to that time and place — which this critic can confirm, as he lived in that place at that time. It’s also more or less the time and place of Aronofsky’s first two films, Pi and the aforementioned Requiem for a Dream, so it has the feel of a professional homecoming for one of the more accomplished filmmakers of the last quarter century. (Butler even looks a bit like the reincarnation of Jared Leto from Requiem, and there are multiple Easter eggs for Men in Black, of all movies, which is also set around this time in some of the same New York boroughs visited here.)

Having driven his car into a telephone pole when he was a teenager with visions of being drafted to play professional baseball, Hank Thompson (Butler) now works as a Lower East Side bartender some ten years later. He doesn’t seem to have much in his life outside of the bar and his love for the San Francisco Giants, which he shares with his mother, heard over the telephone and still situated out in the Bay Area, as the loss of his professional career hasn’t dampened his love for the sport. He does have occasional sex with Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz), an EMT who also likes to walk a bit on the wild side, as saving lives seems to function as some sort of drug for her. She might want more.

If not for some of the career retrospective quality of the themes and subject matter Aronofsky is visiting here, one might be inclined to wonder why he’d make Caught Stealing at all. However, it’s instructive to look at another film coming out in the next month from another acclaimed director from the period of Aronofsky’s ascendency: One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, which also, on the surface, seems to lack some of the ambition of his prior efforts. Instead of holding these filmmakers to the impossible standard of continuing to outdo themselves, we have to allow them sometimes to just make a genre film, especially when they can make it as well as Aronofsky can.

Aronofsky reminds us of his gifts with technique throughout Caught Stealing. He’s no longer using of some of the split-screen and editing tricks that gave him such a distinctive style in Requiem for a Dream, but his eye for the kinetic has not dimmed. The director employs some drone shots and other invigorating narrative choices to keep this one moving propulsively forward, and he’s also got the right actor at the centre of the action. Butler has taken Hollywood by storm the past few years, as his otherworldly charisma paid huge dividends in Elvis and The Bikeriders (to say nothing of his gifts for villainy in Dune Part Two). He’s a great surrogate for us in a genre that requires a good viewer surrogate, and we relate to him as an everyman, even though he was nearly an athletic god.

Some of the specific details of the story feel a little hackneyed, though they could also be allusions to other films. Is the fact that Hank needs to take care of a pet that doesn’t belong to him the sort of tired bit of eccentricity that leavens an otherwise violent film, or is it a nod to the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which also takes place in the lower half of Manhattan? If you saw the “having it all ways at once” mother!, you might be inclined to say that it’s both. So while there is a little tension between theft and homage in Caught Stealing, it mostly plays out in Aronofsky’s favour. Heck, the title might even be a cheeky reference to this tension, in addition to its overt function as baseball terminology.

If you’re longing for the Aronofsky distinguished by his knack for “showing off” — let’s put that in negative terms even though it is often a boon to the film in question — just recreating New York City of 27 years ago might get you there. This is as much a love letter to New York City as anything Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee or Woody Allen ever made. And when you’re being mentioned in the same sentence as those filmmakers — at least in reference to their professional output — it’s usually a good thing. Caught Stealing allows us to appreciate more than a quarter century from a man whose films have not always worked, but whose engagement with all the tools of cinema has been second to none — even when he’s making “just” a genre film.

Caught Stealing is currently playing in cinemas.