“When I was a struggling filmmaker, I grew up with the biggest comedians in the world,” says Darren Aronofsky, referring to his time in the 90s living in New York. “There was this night on Ludlow Street where you’d get Louis CK, Marc Maron, Chris Rock and Sarah Silverman performing for 20 or 30 people.” It explains why even in his darkest dramas, he cast stand-ups and sketch performers like Kristen Wiig in mother!, Todd Barry in The Wrestler, and Marlon Wayans in Requiem for a Dream.

However, the 56-year-old filmmaker has taken 10 features – that’s 27 years after his 1998 debut, Pi – to direct an all-out comedy. Starring Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz, Caught Stealing is brashly hilarious and full of punk-rock energy. Normally, Aronofsky is famous for upsetting his audiences: Requiem for a Dream is a depressing drama about heroin addiction that’s mostly remembered for its depiction of needles, while mother! was so antagonistic that it arguably derailed Jennifer Lawrence’s career. His version of a family-friendly blockbuster was Noah, a dystopian epic in which nearly the entirety of mankind and the planet’s creatures drown to death. The director’s otherwise most commercial effort was The Whale, a claustrophobic adaptation of a play that was either, depending on your perspective, fat-shaming or a two-hour primal scream from the depths of someone’s sadness.

Still, there’s an acknowledged absurdity to his films, even if they’re deeply sincere. “I like melodrama and heightened drama,” he says. “Sometimes that leads to humour. The first screenings of Black Swan were silent. When audiences recognised it was something they wanted to see, people would be verbally laughing and making noises. Caught Stealing has also been nice to see with big crowds. They’re all laughing.”

Is a similar directing muscle required to extract a scare in a horror and a laugh in a comedy? “It takes a long time when you’re planning to shock people visually. With a joke, it just happens in the moment. If you plan a joke too hard, it doesn’t work.”

Charlie Huston, who’s credited for the screenplay, wrote the novel of Caught Stealing in 1998, the same year Aronofsky’s movie adaptation is set. Butler stars as Hank, a former baseball player who serves drinks at a dive bar, dates a cigarette-smoking EMT, Yvonne (Kravitz), and is tasked with cat-sitting for his neighbour, mohawk-haired Russ (Matt Smith). The chaotic comedy revolves around gangsters (Bad Bunny, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio) and a pushy cop (Regina King) who terrorise Hank in regards to a blue key that he’s been hiding for Russ, and misplaced while drinking.

In a way, Caught Stealing is an entire film about the relatable agony of being hungover and realising that you lost your key the previous night. Hank is even told: return the key, and the nightmare ends. (Aronofsky denies that the blue key is a reference to Mulholland Drive, in which a nightmare literally ends once a blue key is located).

However, Caught Stealing isn’t throwaway or sitcom-esque. The humour is derived from the actors playing it straight, and, on paper, the plot is downright depressing: Hank drinks to forget he accidentally killed a friend in a car crash; as the shootouts and chases ensue, the death count increases. The kinetic verve is complemented by the loving period detail (Hank walks past Kim’s Video) and soundtrack. Aronofsky clocks that I’m wearing a 69 Love Songs cap, referencing the iconic 1999 album by The Magnetic Fields. The director went to college with band member Claudia Gonson, hence Caught Stealing ends on “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side”, a pop tune that alludes to a New Yorker being loved for his car, not his personality.

People are nervous. There’s a bit of grief because the way we used to make films is changing. I feel all those feelings. But I’ve always been curious about technology

“Claudia was in my film class. I was totally addicted to 69 Love Songs, and thought that ‘Luckiest Guy’ was a huge hit because I listened to it so much. I guess it wasn’t. Claudia told me it was almost on a huge ad, and it didn’t happen. They were excited to let me end the film with it because of the irony of it.” The director admits that the album doesn’t fit the story’s 1998 timeframe. “It’s the only song I cheated on, but it was so perfect, I had to cheat.”

Aronofsky teases that he’s written a script that’s he’s trying to get made, and, as for rumours he’s directing a superhero movie based on Plastic Man, he says, “There was a time I was interested in [Plastic Man], and we haven’t dove all the way into figuring it out yet. We’ve spent some time talking to DC about it.”

I ask why Caught Stealing opens with a drone shot. I assumed it’s to announce that the film won’t be shot like Pi, which cost $135,000, but he says, “If I was making Pi now, I’d be using drones. Drones aren’t sophisticated, expensive equipment anymore. To do the aerial shots on Noah, we had crazy cable runs – very difficult and super-expensive. Drones have changed filmmaking.”

While Caught Stealing is set in the past, Aronofsky is obsessed with the future. In between The Whale and Caught Stealing, he directed Postcards from the Earth, a film only viewable at Las Vegas’s Sphere on 4D, in 18K, on a 160,000 square-foot screen. He also founded Primordial Soup, an AI-driven studio whose first film is Eliza McNitt’s “Ancestra”, an eight-minute short about childbirth. “Primordial Soup is a story company first,” says Aronofsky. “But we’re interested in playing with new tools. All these AI companies are making models that can make incredible images, but, right now, those shots don’t add up to much. Primordial Soup is trying to figure out: how do you turn those into stories?”

Is AI a side-project, or could the next feature credited as “A Film By Darren Aronofsky” use AI? “I’m not sure those tools are ready for full primetime in a feature film. They’re getting better. These are tools that can make filmmaking better. Not ‘better’. I should say ‘easier’. They’ll automate the process. If you’re doing a film in the 1950s, you can say, ‘Give me 100 hairstyles on this actor,’ and it’ll print out 100 different hairstyles instantly. That would have taken days to do. Now that you can speed things up, what can do you with that extra time?”

I note that AI is a big discussion point, yet Aronofsky seems to be one of the few major filmmakers embracing it. “People are nervous,” he says. “There’s a bit of grief because the way we used to make films is changing. I feel all those feelings. But I’ve always been curious about technology. I think that filmmaking is a technology business, first.” He picks up his phone. “If I was starting out now, I’d be shooting Pi with this, not black-and-white Bolex film. I could then turn it into black-and-white Bolex film.”

Caught Stealing is out in UK cinemas on August 29