The latest Austin Butler movie, Caught Stealing, hit the 2025 movie schedule this weekend, and it did something that I didn’t expect: it made me nostalgic. I am not, by nature, particularly nostalgic. In fact, all the throwbacks to Gen X culture lately have driven me a little nuts, even as a member of that generation. However, the new movie, directed by Darren Aronofsky, had me wistfully remembering my years living in the East Village, right around the time that Caught Steaming is set, 1998.
Alphabet City And Dive Bars
Bulter plays Hank Thompson, a former baseball player (with a nice butt) whose potential career in the pros was sidelined by a knee injury. Hank is working as a bartender in a very typical East Village dive in the late ‘90s. He’s clearly lost, drifting through his city life while remaining distant from the woman he’s dating, played by Zoe Kravitz. It was an existence I knew all too well as someone who moved to New York City in 1999, one year after the movie was set, and spent a lot of my time in the same kind of dive bars.
Eventually, I moved to the East Village from Midtown and lived a couple of blocks away from Avenue A. Alphabet City was still a little seedy, a little sketchy, but it was also on its way to what it is now, which is much cleaner, but much less exciting. Living down there wasn’t as expensive as it is today, but it wasn’t cheap, either. Finding bars that served cheap beer where I could befriend the bartender and score a free drink or two was important. Hank’s bar in Caught Stealing perfectly represents that kind of place. It’s like I already knew it well.
One Brief Scene Really Got Me
In one scene, Hank is seen walking along Avenue A and goes past where the original location of the legendary Kim’s Video was located near 6th Street. For the movie, Aronofsky recreated the iconic sign that hung above the entrance, and in one brief moment, summed up life in the East Village at the time.
Now, when I lived in the East Village, Kim’s had moved a couple of storefronts down from the original location, and the mini-chain had moved the bulk of its collection to what was its most iconic location, Kim’s Mondo on St. Mark’s Street, a few blocks away. The location I knew best, located at 85 Avenue A, was two doors down from where it’s seen in the movie. I used to drink in the basement at a bar called Route 85A. The bartender was a good friend, Michael Hogan, an actor who was most recently seen as the bartender, Mark, in Paradise, which you can watch with a Hulu subscription.
The reason it worked here for me is that nostalgia wasn’t the goal of the movie. That’s what I could use more of, not rehashing my youth with cheap shortcuts like so much of recent nostalgia.
