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Sight & Sound - December 1995 by Ben Thompson Jim Carroll is one of a gang of unruly
teenagers in New York. His mother struggles to keep him under control. Subjected
to savage corporal punishment by the brutal Father McNulty at his Catholic
school, his rebellious spirit is not subdued. Jim and his friends run off to
smoke cigarettes, sniff cleaning fluid and cause mayhem of ferries. A diary allows Jim to give rein to the
more sensitive side of his nature, but most of his time is taken up getting into
trouble. Only basketball offers him and his friends a chance to excel. Coached
by the kindly and sympathetic Swifty, they are heading for glory in the high
school championships. Unable to share in this prospect is Bobo, one of the gang,
who has fallen victim to leukaemia. In a bid to raise his spirits, Jim sneaks
him out of the hospital and takes him to a strip show on 42nd street, but this
only makes Bobo more unhappy. Even basketball games became an
opportunity for thieving and violence, and Jim and the dangerous Mickey become
involved with drugs. Bobo´s death and Jim´s discovery that Swifty´s interest in
him was sexually motivated push him further down the road to delinquency. Only
his older black friend Reggie Porter, with whom he plays one-on-one street
basketball, can offer him any form of guidance. Reggie can do nothing to stop
Jim being expelled from school and thrown out of his house by his despairing
mother. But when he finds Jim freezing to death on the street, having sunk into
an abyss of junkiedom and prostitution, he saves his life. With Reggie´s help, Jim goes cold
turkey, but he is not strong enough to stay off heroin. He robs his friend and
descends back into a life of crime. Pedro, one of the gang-mates, is caught by
the police during a bungled shop-robbery, and Mickey also goes to prison for
killing a drug dealer. Jim goes back to his mother for help but she calls the
police to take him away. He serves three months on Ryker´s Island. An audience
breaks into applause as is turns out he is reading from his now celebrated
diary. * Jim Carroll´s torrid autobiographical
saga of New York street adolescence has taken a long time to get to the screen,
and as if to emphasize this fact, Scott Kalvert´s film seems to be set in an
unspecified anytime. In opting to play up the timelessness of their story the
film´s producers have unwittingly exacerbated a serious flaw within The
Basketball Diaries. What was new and shocking in Jim Carroll´s work in the
60s and 70s has since become the stuff of cliché. The street-smart kid´s descent
into crime and heroin addiction is now too familiar a story, and there is just
nothing in this film to distinguish it. Time has not been especially kind to
Carroll´s homeless poeticisms: "I tried making friends with God by inviting him
to my house to watch the World Series... He never showed." And the supposed
intimacy of the diary format - the self-important young Jim´s "Suffice to say"s
and "Know this"´s - is irritating. Carroll himself (who makes a cameo appearance
as a heroin enthusiast, and also acted as consultant) can hardly be blamed for
the adolescent aspects of the original diaries, as he wrote them between ages of
13 and 16, but it is a pity that the film also adopts such whining
self-justificatory mien. By all accounts, Leonardo DiCaprio is
much happier with the dark, depressive performance he gives here than he was
with his breezy comic turn in Sam Raimi´s The Quick and The Dead. There
is something disturbing about this misjudgement. It is not that DiCaprio does
anything wrong - he can clearly chew the doormat with the best of them, an
no-one could accuse this film of making getting off heroin look easy - it´s the
fact that he felt the need to make it at all. The list of actors for whom this
script was previously developed includes Matt Dillon (who eventually starred in
the vastly superior Drugstore Cowboy), Eric Stoltz and the late River
Phoenix. It is depressing that Phoenix´s tragically premature demise does not
seem to have diminished the allure of junkie-chic for the actor best qualified
to succeed him at the top of the Hollywood charisma tree. DiCaprio does a fine job early on of
conveying Carroll´s aspiration to a "presence like a panther, not presence like
a chimp". And first time director Kalvert (who cut his teeth on rap videos and
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) brings a healthy snap to scenes of boyish
high spirits, daredevil cliff dives into the Hudson River, and homoerotic
on-court bonding. But once the junk kicks in, the fun stops. Which may well be
how things happen in real life, but - as with paint taking a long time to dry -
that does not necessarily make it something anyone would want to pay to
watch. * |