[5]
Leonardo DiCaprio gives a strong early-career performance in this film based on the life of Jim Carroll, a promising young basketball player and writer whose life was derailed by drug addition in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The film transplants Carroll’s experiences into the 1990s, following the troubled New Yorker through his strict and sordid Catholic School education, a tough-love relationship with his mother (Lorraine Bracco), and his all-consuming friendship with three other misanthropic boys played by Mark Wahlberg, James Madio, and Patrick McGaw. As he circles the drain, it’s ultimately intervention from his mom and a sympathetic neighbor (Ernie Hudson) who get Carroll’s life back on track.
Despite DiCaprio’s remarkably raw performance, The Basketball Diaries doesn’t seem to tell the whole story of Carroll’s troubled adolescence. It wallows in Carroll’s misery, focusing nearly all its run time on the seedier, more disturbing parts: evading a pedophile basketball coach (Bruno Kirby), stealing money and cars, losing a friend to cancer, drug-induced crime sprees, and even manslaughter. The film is relatively unconcerned with any sort of character arc or catharsis for Carroll, severely shortchanging his passion for basketball and writing, and the relationships that saved his life. More substantial scenes with both Bracco and Hudson would have helped balance out this biopic and made the finale more rewarding. Without that catharsis and balance, the film is overly dark and depressing, almost verging on ‘tragedy porn’. But the harrowing downward spiral is captured believably and fans of DiCaprio are sure to see the actor’s future Oscar potential (he’d win the trophy twenty years later for The Revenant). Wahlberg is also a standout as Carroll’s most volatile, risk-embracing friend.
Directed by Scott Kalvert. With Juliette Lewis and Roy Cooper.