Is Austin Butler a movie star?

In the old days of Hollywood, stars and starlets alike were anointed as “It” girls and men. Nobody was ever quite sure what “It” denoted – star quality, sex appeal, charisma, a willingness to sleep with studio executives – but when they were told they had “It,” their careers appeared made, for the present time at least.

Today, however, with Marvel and superhero films largely making the idea of the movie star irrelevant, the concept of “It” is ever decreasing. I am sure that David Corenswet, this year’s Superman, is a lovely man, but I would struggle to recognize him if I passed him on the street without his Super-costume on. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt aside, it seems as if the era of the old-school male leading man is past us now. Which in turn, bluntly, means that nobody is going to see the pictures that younger, supposedly hot actors are appearing in.

While we must wait and see whether Edgar Wright’s new version of The Running Man, with borderline movie star Glen Powell, will be a hit or flop, another leading man has recently appeared in a similarly kinetic picture. When Austin Butler emerged onto screens in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, it was one of those rare star-is-born moments that seemed the perfect synthesis of actor, role and vehicle. He was nominated for an Oscar (which he should have won) and since then has capitalized on his success with roles in everything from Dune Part Two and Eddington to the main part in the megabudget series Masters of the Air. Now, he has his first bona fide cinematic lead in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, which should, by rights, catapult him into the Hollywood A-list.

It says a lot for the perverse Aronofsky (the man, lest we forget, who gave us the horrors of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan) that he should take his handsome leading man and subject him to untold horrors through the relatively brief course of the picture. These horrors include, in no particular order: Butler’s character being beaten so hard that he loses a kidney; following sundry threats, having his face rearranged so often that it begins to look like an abstract work by Picasso (late period); and, perhaps most egregiously of all, being required to sport a deeply unflattering Mohican hairstyle for reasons that become clear while watching the film.

Butler’s character is a once-promising baseball player turned alcohol-loving bartender who finds himself involved in grim levels of violence after he reluctantly agrees to mind his British punk rocker neighbor’s cat. Various criminals are after something – money – and Butler’s good-natured Hank finds himself, in classic Hitchcockian fashion, becoming the wrong man in a series of vicious pursuits. By the time that a wonderfully deadpan Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio turn up as a pair of deeply observant and deeply violent Hasidic Jews, all one can do is surrender to this wild, often horribly unpleasant ride.

Will it do anything for its young star’s career? It’s hard to say. The character is not wholly sympathetic – the reason for his baseball career being abandoned is that he causes the death of his best friend in a drunken car accident – and Hollywood tends to like its heroes to be square-jawed and masculine. Look at Cruise in Top Gun, Pitt in FI: they are playing Men with a capital M, thoroughly heterosexual archetypes who can save the day and get the (age appropriate) girl with time to spare. Butler may be just as good looking as those two sexagenarians, but there’s an angst and a wryly observant wit to both character and actor that means he probably doesn’t want to be the next standard-issue heartthrob. Lest we forget, this is the man who carried on speaking like Elvis for months after he stopped filming, on the grounds that he could no longer remember what his natural accent sounds like.

Caught Stealing may not be a masterpiece, or anything close to Aronofsky’s best film. But it is trashy, nasty B-movie fun that channels the spirit of After Hours and The Big Lebowski to entertaining effect, and it proves that Butler might be something even more interesting than the next leading man: he might be the next Jude Law. And that, as anyone who’s followed Law’s remarkably varied and entertaining career, is something worth aiming for.