Review #13: 'The Basketball Diaries' (1995)

Based on the autobiographical novel written by Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries follows one young man's descent into addiction, crime and homelessness. Jim (here played with mature dedication by Leonardo Di Caprio) is a promising high school basketball player, who along with his three friends, enjoy shooting hoops and getting into general mischief. What starts out as a past-time, soon deteriorates into something more deprived and desperate, as Jim sees his world crash around him as his drug habit becomes an unstoppable affliction.

When Jim's situation gets so desperate that he leaves home to hustle and rob on the streets, he begins to push away the people in his life that were once close to him. His mother, played by Lorraine Bracco, throws him out after the extremities of his situation become apparent to her and refuses him back. Reggie (Ernie Hudson) was an inspirational figure and mentor to Jim and regularly met up to play basketball in the court. And Neutron (Patrick McGaw) distances himself from Jim and his friends' habits and focuses on his basketball career, much to Jim's dismay. These people will all have a profound effect on Jim's eventual redemption. The film also switches the book's real-life setting from 1960's New York to the 90's.

What The Basketball Diaries attempts to do is to create a realistic and gritty (a phrase that seems to be thrown around a lot these days) depiction of drug abuse, and create a hellish portrait of a confused young man who his throwing away his many talents in favour of a life that is doing nothing but ruining his life and isolating the people around him. In reality, this is a terribly-directed film that seems to sledgehammer the phrase 'drugs are bad' into the viewers skull, rather than having the nerve, or in deed the respect, to let the audience make their own mind up. Or maybe the director doesn't have the skill to create a film capable of conjuring up those feelings in the viewer. It sounds ridiculous, but if you have seen the South Park episode where Mr Mackey is giving his anti-drug lecture by simply listing the drugs that are 'bad', then you can see a clear parallel to this film. Jim basically goes from one drug to the other and one crime to the next. It's not interesting, convincing, and to be honest I found it all just very annoying.

Jim is a character of no redeeming qualities. He's selfish, careless, and is basically a whiny little shit. Fair enough, this is a chance to develop an interesting, fully-rounded character, but director Scott Kalvert and scriptwriter Bryan Goluboff cannot combine their 'skills' to pull it off. Even though Jim narrates the film and reveals everything about his feelings and opinions, and Di Caprio's fantastic performance, we never get inside Jim's head enough to understand him and why he is willing to give up on a fledging basketball career. This is a character that we're supposed to be praying for to overcome his addiction, but (spoilers!) when his clean-break arrived, I asked myself should I be feeling happy for this arsehole?

A well-acted film all-round, namely from the lead and Mark Wahlberg as his friend Mickey, but a film that is swamped in faults and scenes that are just ridiculous. Possibly only remotely remembered for the controversial scene where Jim storms his school with a shotgun in a drug-addled fantasy, which was caught up in the media storm surrounding the Columbine High School massacre. Watch only for signs of early promise from Di Caprio, but otherwise avoid.


Directed by: Scott Kalvert
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lorraine Bracco, Mark Wahlberg, Bruno Kirby, James Madio
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie