The Basketball Diaries Review

A music video director was the wrong hire for this book, and the mismatch shows at every transition. Jim Carroll's memoir is specific about a 1960s New York that Scott Kalvert declines to reconstruct, about parochial school routine and playground basketball and the particular boredom that precedes a habit. The film flattens all of it into montage.

Every escalation arrives pre scored, slow motion gets applied to heroin the same way it gets applied to dunks, and the dream sequence in which Jim guns down his classmates is tasteless and dramatically empty at once. What survives is DiCaprio, who plays the withdrawal on the stoop without a shred of vanity and finds the wheedling register of an addict asking his mother for money through a locked door.

Lorraine Bracco meets him there, and the two of them make that scene the only honest thing in the picture. Mark Wahlberg, very early in his career, stiffens whenever a line runs past one sentence, and Bruno Kirby's coach is written as a warning label. The film wants credit for being unflinching while cutting away from anything genuinely ugly, then finishes at a podium with a redemption nobody dramatised.