Austin Butler in the caper of Darren Aronofsky

You don’t expect Darren Aronofsky to make a smooth criminal film, but that’s exactly what this entertaining, sinuous and ultimately bloody caper. Pushed by the magnetism of Austin Butler and the chiseled support of the turns of a group of high -level actors, Flying is the most openly commercial film that Erofsky has ever made. It may not seem much next to the dark psychology of Black swanNo doubt his best film. But even his most common efforts, as The whaleare not as shiny and elegant as that, and he pulls it beautifully.

Butler plays Hank, formerly a baseball player at the talented high school whose realistic hopes of becoming pro were finished with an injury. Now he is a goalless bar that takes care of a Grungy dive in the New York Lower East Side in 1998, when the gentrification had not fully taken root. The atmosphere is granular and specific, of the opening credits, displayed in the form of tiles on the ruin metro walls, to the mounds of the garbage in the street to the stickers on the door of the neighbor of Hank, Russ (Matt Smith), who say that “Giuliani is a jerk” and “Die Yuppie Scum”.

Russ looks like a caricature of a British punk, with a wild blond mohawk and a studded leather jacket, but the joke quickly gives way to action when Russ leaves his cat with Hank while he returns to England. Soon, the Russian thugs beat Hank in his corridor, looking for Russ and the drug money he hid and that Hank knows nothing. With his look with a wide eyes, Butler is perfectly interpreted as the innocent people who must call on his mind and MacGyver who came out of a mess.

Zoë Kravitz embodies Hank’s girlfriend, Yvonne, whose skills as a paramedical ambulancer are useful. Yvonne seems in the film especially to have hot sex with Hank at first, then to disappear once she fulfilled her goal in the plot. Most support characters come and go in this direction, a device that turns out to be a functionality and not a bug. The intrigue resembles a story of shaggy dogs which seems to be snapping in unexpected directions, even if the story remains focused on running for its life, pursued by thugs.

Among the acts of net support, Regina King plays the detective Hank calls for help and Bad Bunny (presented by his real name, Benito Martinez Ocasio) plays the elegant boss of the Russians. Griffin Dunne plays Paul, the owner of the bar where Hank works. There is another visual joke, resembling an aging biker with a long gray ponytail and a sleeveless leather vest.

Liev Schreiber and Vincent d’Onofrio play the characters of the least typical crime, Lipa and Shmully, Brothers Hasidic who can be the most deadly of the killers to cross the path of Hank. Onofrio gets his best line, when he suggests that someone else has to drive a flight car. “I have enough problems with Hashem without driving on Chabbos,” he says. Carol Kane is their Bubbe. Even if they all move in and out of the film and vice versa, the script of Charlie Huston, based on their 2004 novel, maintains things in motion and publishing adds momentum to each scene.

There is certainly a current of the typical darkness of Aronofsky in the number of bloody shootings and all the corpses scattered, with innocent passers -by as well as bad guys who collapsed with casualness. And Hank has his personal demons. He has nightmares, which we consider flashbacks, the car accident that caused his injury when he was recklessly driving. Butler brings depth to these scenes, his face expressing pain beyond what the scenario gives him, and Aronofsky has the common sense to keep the camera near him in these moments. But above all, Butler turns towards the action because Hank must exceed various thugs, whether it is a window edge or to slide under the cart of a seller as if he was heading towards the base.

Despite all the bloody violence, there is a dynamic feeling in the film. Matthew Lebatique, director of constant and brilliant photography of Aronofsky, makes the city brilliant outside and the look is vibrant even in the Dingy bar. Flying is an anomaly, a dark soap bubble of entertainment. And this oddity makes this film improbable sparkle.