For his role as Russ, a punky chancer living in New York’s Lower East Side in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, Matt Smith did something he’d never done before – he sported a mohawk.

“I liked it more than I thought I would,” he says of the shaved-on-sides, long-on-top, held-together-with-glue do. “It was yellow and green as well, which on paper sounds shit, but it was all right. It was kind of cool.”

Smith was born in 1982, just after the first wave of Britain’s punk explosion came crashing down. Still, he says, “you felt the effect of punk very seriously” as he was growing up. “But it wasn’t a scene I was part of, so it was nice to get to pretend to be part of it for a while and to sort of adopt the attitude. Because I think, in a way, it’s quite a healthy attitude in life.”

If there’s one thing Caught Stealing has in spades it is attitude. Adapted by Charlie Huston from their own novel, it’s a madcap ride through New York’s grimy downtown in 1998.

This is the part of the city in which Aronofsky – whose films include Requiem For a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Noah and The Whale – knows well.

“I walked down Avenue A hundreds of times, if not thousands of times, in the ’90s,” he tells me. “It’s my neighbourhood.”

Of course, it’s not the same neighbourhood it was back when Aronofsky was shooting his debut feature Pi. But with many of the same crew on board, the filmmakers worked hard to capture – and to a degree recreate – the manic buzz, chaos and multicultural diversity of the streets at the foot of Manhattan.

“The East Village is the kernel that makes New York City pop,” Aronofsky says. “To me, it’s the most electric, most creative, most fun place in the world.”

Caught Stealing is the first of three novels from non-binary Huston featuring Henry “Hank” Thompson, a former teenage baseball prodigy whose career was cut short by a dreadful car crash.

We first meet Hank (Austin Butler) as he’s serving drinks at Paul’s Bar, the kind of corner dive that’s packed to the gills with colourful characters and dubious transactions. He’s a little too fond of a drink himself, perhaps, but he has a paramedic girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz), who may just be reason enough to get his act together.

But when Russ (Smith) asks Hank to mind his cat while he returns to London to visit his ailing dad, everything goes off the rails. A couple of Ukrainian gangsters (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov) turn up, then a Puerto Rican drug dealer (played by multi-Grammy winner Bad Bunny), and then a pair of Orthodox Jewish gangster brothers (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio). Oh, and a tough-love cop (Regina King) is on the case, too, though whether she is friend or foe is not too clear to Hank.

For anyone who knows the work of Aronofsky – which, for want of a better word, you might term cerebral (and not only because of that trepanning scene in his 1998 debut) – Caught Stealing represents a real change of pace.

“Fully,” says King. “And that in itself was even more of a draw. You read the script, and …”

“You go, ‘wow, Darren’s gonna direct this’,” Smith chips in. “And then, actually having seen him direct it, you go, ‘I don’t think anyone else could have directed it’.”

For Aronofsky, taking on something as frenetic and fast-paced as this was not exactly deliberate.

“I don’t know if it’s fully a conscious effort, ever,” he says of what guides his choice of project. “It’s more like, what’s ahead of me, and what do I want to make.”

Huston’s story spoke to him because it was so kinetic. “I love the electricity of the life on the streets of the East Village in the ’90s, it just felt fun, and I was constantly surprised … you don’t often find a major hero who loses a kidney in the first 20 minutes of a movie.”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that Caught Stealing – broadly speaking, a violent crime comedy – might be his most commercial film in a long time, perhaps ever (certainly a lot more commercial than Mother!, for instance). And for Aronofsky it represents a return to, or embrace of, what he thinks Hollywood cinema does best.

“I’m always looking in today’s crazy, fast-paced world for something that will distract me and entertain me really well for a couple of hours, and I was struggling a little to find that,” he says. “I was like, ‘why can’t I do something like that? Why can’t I get together all of my great collaborators and let’s just make something fun for an audience, and give them a good time?’

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” he adds. “Maybe I used to think there was something wrong with that. Maybe I have changed a little bit. But I think if Hollywood can do anything, it’s entertain. So let’s go back to the basics, and let’s make great entertainment, because we are competing so much now for people’s attention that we better just really make fun films.”

Caught Stealing certainly delivers on that score. In fact, the film it most reminds me of is Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), a madcap comedy of misadventure starring Griffin Dunne as Paul, a yuppie who gets caught on the wrong side of the city when his only banknote (remember them?) blows out the window of a taxi as he’s en route to meet a woman he barely knows.

The fact Dunne plays the bar owner Paul in this film must, surely, be a knowing wink to the Scorsese film?

“Not really,” Aronofsky says. “There were a bunch of actors I spoke to before I realised Griffin was available and I went after him. The fact he’s Paul in this movie as well is purely coincidence. It’s all in the book.

“I love that there’s a connection to it, but it’s not conscious. I mean, it is conscious now, but it wasn’t really behind the decision to cast him.”

New York City is as much a character as a location in Caught Stealing, in all its messy multicultural glory.

“One of the greatest things in the world about my hometown,” says Brooklyn-born Aronofsky, “is you go onto a subway during rush hour and there are people from every corner of the planet, and everyone is coexisting really well. They all bring their own participation to the party, be it their own languages, their own music, their own food, but they are all New Yorkers. And that’s what’s beautiful about this city.”

Given there are more Hank books, it seems only sensible to ask if there might be more Hank movies.

“You know what – the market will decide,” he says.

And if the market says yes, would you be interested in revisiting it?

“Yeah. If the market demands it, I would talk to Austin and we’ll see where we’re both at. But that guy’s going to have a very busy dance card for a while, so we’ll see what happens.”

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