The Basketball Diaries

A film set in New York. Jim plays basketball at a Catholic school. He is good at it, he writes, and he goes around with three friends who steal, sniff cleaning fluid and pick fights. Then heroin comes in. It starts as something done at the weekend and becomes the whole of his life. From there the film only goes down. He is thrown off the team, thrown out of the house, sleeps in the street, steals from his mother and sells himself for money. There is a scene at his mother's door. She will not open it, and it is the hardest thing in the film. The narrative gives no lesson. There is no scene explaining why he started; drugs simply arrive and take everything. What the narrative is interested in is not addiction but writing: Jim keeps a diary all the way through and the voice-over comes from it. The source is a real book. Jim Carroll published the diaries he kept between thirteen and sixteen; he was a real basketball player, and later a poet and a musician. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jim, early in his career and before the parts that made him famous. Mark Wahlberg is in the cast. Ernie Cabey and Juliette Lewis appear. Scott Kalvert directed; he came from music videos and this was his first feature. The film became a subject of political argument in the United States after the Columbine shooting, because of a dream sequence in which Jim walks into the classroom with a gun under a long coat. Who it is for: anyone who wants a hard drug film and an actor at the start of his run. Who it is not for: anyone the subject would weigh on; the scenes of withdrawal and prostitution are direct and offer no relief.