THE BASKETBALL DIARIES
A film review by Steve Basile
Copyright 1995 Steve Basile
[Note: This film premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival, Austin Texas, on Monday, 13 March, 1995. It opens in wide release this Friday, 21 April. Some minor SPOILERS follow.]
Directed by Scott Kalvert
Cast in alphabetical order. Lorraine Bracco .....Mrs. Carroll Jim Carroll .........Frankie Leonardo DiCaprio ...Jim Carroll Ernie Hudson ........Reggie Michael Imperioli ...Bobby Bruno Kirby .........Swifty James Madio .........Pedro Patrick McGaw .......Neutron Michael Rapaport ....skinhead Mark Wahlberg .......Mickey
"You just got to see that junk is just another nine-to-five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined toward shadows...."
With these words, Jim Carroll wraps up a reading from his diaries, the same diaries for which this new film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio is named. With these words we are led to believe he is, for the time being anyway, redeemed, saved from the torments of addiction, and worse.
The movie may be a bit too neatly tied-up at times, but its story is compelling, engaging and emotionally draining. Ultimately, we enjoy the same sort of thrill watching this film as we might get from reading anyone's secret diary, more so as a result of this diarist's fluid prose and stark, street-smart poetic insight.
DiCaprio delivers a wonderful performance as Jim Carroll, "Catholic Boy" gone bad, taking us on a poet's journey through a boy's life: high-school round ball, tentative sexual encounters, hanging out with the "wrong friends," and dabbling with a progression of drugs, crime, death and eventual redemption.
As in past roles, (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy's Life) DiCaprio immerses himself to the point of disappearance in his role, seemingly *becoming* Carroll, to the point that the real Jim Carroll (who appears in a ghostly, skeletal cameo) appears a caricature of himself.
We want to *like* Jim, who seems to have so much going for him in the early stages of the film. He has a good, if overly disciplined education, athletic ability, boyish good looks and friends who seem to care. We are worried when he begins to experiment with Carbona, and glue, then with progressively harder drugs, and feel ourselves sinking with him as his downfall progresses.
Mark ("Don't Call Me Marky-Mark") Wahlberg vindicates himself admirably, in an effective and unassuming portrayal of Carroll's friend Mickey, showing little of the punk/rap bravado that early naysayers were certain would mar his performance. Lorraine Bracco is convincing and inspires real sympathy as Carroll's mother, torn between her desire to provide for her son and her worst fears that he is slipping away.
But this is DiCaprio's film, and his remarkable transformation into a dark and scheming junkie out for the next high is profound and staggering. Scenes with Ernie Hudson, his older, wiser and street-toughened basketball rival, as Carroll attempts to ride out "the cure" cold turkey are gruesome to watch, and filmed in quick snippets of freeze-framed emotion, betraying director Kalvert's music video past. Elsewhere, his emotional reaction to the death of his best friend is moving and real, and the twisted jubilance that follows strangely jarring, yet coherent.
The film is far from perfect, with musical set pieces a bit jarring at times, especially when the real Jim Carroll's pop tunes from the early 80's are introduced. Some time settings are off (NY's Times Square is only now undergoing the renovations seen in the film; at the time in which the book was set it was as seedy and decaying as ever). For some, the too-neat ending might smack of "deus ex machina" in its too-tidy wrap-up of a decidedly untidy life.
But these are small nits to pick. Overall, this film presents a richly woven swatch of a fabric many of us never feel, of life on the streets seen through the eyes of one who can really tell us about it, make us feel it, make us hurt. Visually slick, morally ambiguous, possessed of a truly engaging tour guide, The Basketball Diaries is a cinematic trip to a place most of us rarely visit, but will benefit from having seen.
Score: 6/10 (7 for DiCaprio buffs)
-- Steve Basile Movie Buff
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