`Basketball Diaries' tells of an artist's sordid youth

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RATING: * * * *

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by Marty Beard

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I don't know why, but almost everything these days that I pick up to review also happens to be really disturbing, and I'm not even prudish. Last week it was Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers . This week it's The Basketball Diaries , newly out on PolyGram Video.

Oscar-nominated actor Leonardo DiCaprio ( What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Quick and the Dead ) stars as the New York City artist, musician, painter and writer Jim Carroll, who, in the beginning of this movie, starts out as the star on a Catholic boys' school's basketball team.

The Basketball Diaries is a vivid biographical movie based on Jim Carroll's cathartic diaries, completed when he was only 17. At first, the blond and handsome Jim seems like an ordinary enough high schooler: he plays basketball and plays it well, he hangs out with his friends, he fights a lot with his mother (Lorraine Bracco), he chases (and gets) girls.

But when Jim's best friend, Bobby, (Michael Imperioli) dies of leukemia, Jim and his friends go harder and harder into drugs, beginning with random inhalants. Predictably enough, Jim's life falls apart when he tries heroin.

"When you do dope, at first you do it on Saturday nights and you feel cool, like a gangster or a rock star. But it's so good that then you do it on Tuesdays, and then Thursdays, and then it's got you," Jim narrates.

When Jim is high, it's indicated by clips in which he runs, bare-chested, through a blurry field of flowers. This may be a clichéd device, but it works. Director Scott Kalvert uses abrupt, murky wipes to indicate the transitions between scenes; these transitions become impossible to distinguish from Jim's blackouts.

We watch Jim disintegrate from a handsome, well-muscled high school senior and All-American High School Basketball Team hopeful into a chalky-lipped, emaciated and bruised dropout who ends up so desparate that he has to prostitute himself to middle-aged men in order to earn enough money to be able to afford his next high. As Jim fades, it becomes clear that this movie in no way glamorizes drugs and drug culture.

This true story doesn't make heroin look like anything you'd want to try. Wouldn't it be cool to drool a lot and rob candy stores for the cash to score some dope? Doesn't withdrawal look like fun? And doesn't shooting up and sharing needles seem like a good idea? And the movie gets its point across without excessively oversentimentalizing Jim's decline.

Jim, of course, hits rock bottom, and it's not pretty. One positive aspect about this movie is that with the help of his friend Reggie (Ernie Hudson) -- the only father figure in the movie -- Jim cleans up and goes on. (Be warned: DiCaprio performs harrowingly realistic withdrawal scenes.)

DiCaprio is not the only talent that appears in The Basketball Diaries. Mark Wahlburg, a.k.a. Marky Mark, does a believable turn in the film as Mickey, one of Jim's cohorts. Juliette Lewis appears here, too, in the small but sleazily significant role of Diane, a prostitute.

The Basketball Diaries may have a great soundtrack, with songs like the Doors' "Riders on the Storm," and P.J. Harvey's "Down By the Water," but the well-chosen songs are some of the only places where any upbeatness lurks in this film. As an added bonus, Carroll himself, backed by none other than Pearl Jam, also contributes tracks to the film.

The Basketball Diaries is a thought-provoking film. While not exactly uplifting, it's worth seeing, especially if you've lived a sheltered life and don't know much about the gritty life of the streets.

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the September 8, 1995 issue.

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