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Basketball Diaries
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by Polygram Video
Sales Rank: 21275
Price: $14.95
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The pre-<I>Titanic</I> Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jim Carroll, the poet and musician who spent much of his adolescence addicted to heroin and shooting hoops with fellow Catholic high school kids. As a biography, the film doesn't amount to more than the sum of its gritty scenes of smack use, violence, perversions (poor Bruno Kirby plays a lecherous coach who comes on to young Jim), and the usual scream-and-puke dramas that go along with a cold-turkey session. Director Scott Kalvert doesn't seem to realize that most people don't know who Carroll is and therefore can't possibly understand why they should care about his gutterball youth. DiCaprio, having nowhere to go with his performance but maintain Carroll's tailspin, is boring and redundant. Some kind of allusion to the literary and rock & roll life that follows the mess we're watching might have been helpful. <i>--Tom Keogh</i>
Viewer Reviews
Shortly before he died of a drug overdose River Phoenix was asked what he was going to do next. He took a dog eared copy of The Basketball Diaries out of his pocket and said he wanted to play Jim Carroll. The Basketball Diaries project did get made, except with Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Phoenix. At the risk of being typecast River was set to follow that by playing the poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. DiCaprio picked up that role as well. The Basketball Diaries turned out pretty well for Leo, and was also a good break for Mark Wahlberg. There was however one unintended consequence: the students at Columbine copied not only DeCaprio's black trench coat, but also his violent fantasy of shooting up the school.
Copy cat killers are a large problem for film makers. Oliver Stone tried to make a statement about violence and how it was glorified in movies and the news media with Natural Born Killers. Result: Copy cats. Seems like Stone fell right into his own trap (Juliette Lewis is in Basketball Diaries and Natural Born Killers, by the way). Take Taxi Driver as another example of what can go dreadfully wrong.
I don't have any answers but am just pointing out the pitfalls for an artist who tries to address serious social issues with a very powerful and seductive medium. The Basketball Diaries also had to be careful not to glorify heroin. It kind of did in the first part, but then it tried to make up for it in the second part by showing a lot of puking and screaming--which is good as a cautionary tale, but it doesn't necessarily make for the best feel good movie of the summer.
On the other hand, I also feel that the book that Jim Carroll wrote was misrepresented by the movie. Stephen Lang turned down the part of Swifty the basketball coach that went to Bruno Kirby because he felt the book was misrepresented. But that's Hollywood for ya. They made it into much more of a standard cliche plot, a cautionary tale, more like an after school special.
Still, there was a lot to like about this movie, and the Jim Carroll story is quite a compelling one. Though at a young and tender age he was a petty criminal, heroin addict, and prostituted himself to support his drug habit, he managed to turn it around and become a successful poet, author, and rock musician. Carroll was also a high school basketball star, which can't be easy when your double life is a junkie. He also had a cameo in The Basketball Diaries playing, what else? a junkie. So, add acting to his already impressive resume. Also, though they tinkered with the book somewhat, there is plenty of verbage lifted directly from it, and his prose style always lifts the material above the mundane.
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Jim Carroll: And it's good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies... so we can dance.
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The basketball scenes are exhilarating, as are all the early scenes before the negative effects of addiction take hold. Besides a great performance by DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg also acquits himself well, as do Michael Imperioli and James Madio. Imperioli plays Bobby, a basketball star buddy of Carroll's who is dying of leukemia. Madio plays Pedro, who although too short to play on the basketball team, is nevertheless kind of the team mascot and a member of the gang.
Music plays a vital role in the film, and the song "People Who Died" is especially effective since Carroll wrote and performed it, and some of the people in the lyrics, like Bobby, for instance are the ones in the movie, and Carroll's own real life. Also great are Patti Smith's "Dancing Backwards," "Riders of the Storm" by The Doors, and the musical high point for me, "Down by the Water" by PJ Harvey. Her album, To Bring You My Love, had just come out in 1995, the year the film was released, and though the song didn't yet exist at the time period the movie was supposed to be in, it nevertheless managed to capture the feeling.
The Basketball Diaries
Living at the Movies (Poets, Penguin)
Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973
The Book of Nods
Catholic Boy
Natural Born Killers - Oliver Stone Collection
To Bring You My Love
Boogie Nights
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Total Eclipse
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Jim Carroll: I felt dazed, like I just came out of a 4 hour movie I didn't understand.
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