Austin Butler’s Hat in ‘Caught Stealing’ Should Be Way Dirtier

If I step outside, I’m wearing one of several Texas Rangers baseball hats. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor lop-sided loss will keep me from doing so. Given their history of being absolute trash, it has mostly been a badge of honor from which I never waver. Since they won the World Series in 2023, I can hold my cap-clad head a little higher. Especially since I can now wear a Rangers hat that has an official World Series patch from their fateful season. I wear it constantly, and, y’all, that thing is nasty.

My beloved hat, which I’ve admittedly only had for a year and a half, gets filthy really quickly. I’m a year-round sweater, so I’m always a slightly warm day away from it being covered with white stains. The patch, made by the wildly successful hacks at Fanatics, is already starting to wear down, thanks to the elements. It looks like I’ve had it for years, and it’s not the first hat I’ve absolutely destroyed just by existing, and I’m not even a filthy bartender on the Lower East Side in the late 90s.

That would be Austin Butler’s character, Hank, from Darren Aronofsky’s new film Caught Stealing. Butler’s character is an alcoholic who works until 4 AM, when he’s not getting so wasted that he pukes on a door and gets naked on the sidewalk (been there for both, honestly). The dude has beer for breakfast. He also loves the San Francisco Giants, having had aspirations to play for them, and wears one of their signature hats whenever he can. It is immaculate.

My baseball hat-wearing days also included the late 90s. Sweat still worked the same way. Butler’s hat should be disgusting. Yes, it’s a movie, and he’s a movie star. The amount of liquor he drinks, and for how long and why he’s been consuming it so much, should give him, at a minimum, a paunch. Instead, my man is riddled with c*m-gutters. His apartment isn’t even that dirty. The movie isn’t even that dirty, save for the aforementioned puke and a clogged toilet. There’s a sex scene that isn’t even that dirty!

Butler is dating a paramedic played by Zoe Kravitz in this movie. Their sex scene is teased in all of the trailers, with them stripping down across from each other, and, in context, it just feels silly. It’s, like, five in the morning, he’s been working at a disgusting bar, she just got off an all-night shift where she helped an OD victim, but he’s clean as can be, and she, presumably, had her sexy lacy underwear on the whole time. Maybe that’s how she works! But it seems pretty impractical to have jagged-looking lace scraping against you while you’re trying to help all manner of NYC residents.

It doesn’t stop there! Matt Smith plays a punk next-door neighbor with a mohawk and no shortage of leather jackets, and all of them look like they’re fresh off the rack. There’s fun to be had with the film, and there’s lots of attention to detail for a late-90s NYC (despite some buildings having very modern electronic doorbells), but, for an NYC that was from a dirtier time, its residents were clean as can be. I thought it was just going to be an issue with Butler’s hat, but it permeates the whole film. Still a fun time, though.