Those Are People Who Died!
Jimmy had a heart attack, he was 60 years old,
Strung out for a while before he stopped cold,
Then became a poet with some albums on the side,
Jimmy, we’ll miss you man… Another icon who died!
Real stories of individual decay always seem to make for good drama; they draw people in somehow, maybe because they serve as a reminder to maintain our vigilance. This was true with Les Nuits Fauves, and it also seems to hold true with Scott Kalvert’s adaptation of The Basketball Diaries, the autobiographical novel of former rocker, poet and heroin addict, Jim Carroll. The teen years — an age of uncertainty and rebellion under the best of circumstances — can be devastating when an individual loses control. The Basketball Diaries captures this with an unrelenting effectiveness, though in the end, the book a bit more than the movie.
The topic of drug abuse itself isn’t terribly original, but the presentation of an honest narrative provides a persuasive view of a painful scenario. Perhaps that is the reason this film works as well as it does: because of its believability. You don’t really need to keep a tally of which scenes don’t seem to hold true. In addition to Drugstore Cowboy, Trainspotting, and Requiem For a Dream, this is one of the more realistic cinematic portrayals of drug addiction that I’ve seen.
Jimmy Carroll (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a pre-Titanic role) is a star basketball player on his New York City Catholic high school team. His fellow teammates, Mickey (played by Marky Mark Wahlberg) and Neutron (played Patrick McGaw), and unofficial team cheerleader Pedro (played by James Madio), are Jimmy’s closest friends, and whenever trouble reaches one, it invariably afflicts them all. Jimmy is the star of the St. Vitus team, and it is expected that he will continue his stardom after graduation. However, being a rebellious teenager, he has problems adjusting to Catholic school, as well as dealing with his own broken home and his best friend Bobby (played by Michael Imperioli) dying from leukemia. In order to escape it all, Jimmy seeks refuge in casual sex and drug use.
When the drug phase starts, it quickly spreads to every corner of their friendship. What begins as casual, experimental use quickly becomes a weekend habit, and then an every day obsession. Relationships deteriorate, grades plummet, on-court performances vanish, and crime becomes the primary means to pay for what seems like an endless supply of uppers, downers, cocaine, and then heroin. All of this happens by the time the group is 16.
What I appreciate about this movie is how Carroll’s teenage years are set against a backdrop of the New York City-era portrayed in old Scorsese films. We learn rather candidly about what addiction to glue, pills, and heroin entails - and what Carroll did to get them - but we also see a sliver of what New York City was like back during part of its heyday, the gritty, decaying parts and all. It’s like meeting an old artist who has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment in Alphabet City for the last thirty years, telling you stories about what the East Village was like during the 70’s and 80’s, well before Giuliani came around. Drugs were everywhere, and things were less safe in Tompkins Square Park, but at least artists could still afford to live in the city.
The movie begins rather frenetically, capturing the somewhat manic style of Carroll’s voice, depicting Jimmy and his friends getting high off of household chemicals, skipping school, ripping off street vendors. You think this all seems like some typical teenage angst, but then the serious drug use starts. Watching the struggles Jimmy goes through — losing friends, trying to be clean yet failing, prostituting, begging for money, getting kicked out of his house — it is difficult to comprehend how someone can go through that much and come out of it alive.
DiCaprio’s portrayal of Carroll is impressive, particularly considering that he was only 20 when he filmed the movie. His performance is matched by equally impressive supporting roles. Lorraine Bracco stands out in the role of Jimmy’s mother, particularly in one moving scene that depicts the final destruction of their family. In addition, James Kirby excels with an effective portrayal of a creepy basketball coach who makes sexual advances at his players. Juliette Lewis is convincing in the role of a street junkie, also interesting when considering the actress had some real-life drug problems around the time of this film.
There have been a number of drug addiction movies made, though many are somewhat pedantic or focus primarily on transitioning the down-and-out addict to the productive member of society and not the specific experiences of the addict. Films like this one, which paint a stark, ugly portrait of drug abuse, but neither glamorize drug use nor condemn it per se, seem less common. It’s not the kind of movie that is likely to do well at the box office, mostly because much of what is portrayed is too raw. Basketball Diaries had the relative misfortune of being released around the same time as two other successful films that dealt with similar subject matter: Larry Clark’s Kids, and Danny Boyle’s award winning Trainspotting. The former dealt with teenagers’ alienation from society, while the latter dealt specifically with the dark and surreal side of urban drug addiction. In a sense, Basketball Diaries is a combination of the two stories, but because of real life circumstances, it ends on a relatively positive note. To some, this might seem a little too cliché.
Like a lot of adaptations, the movie overlooks many of the details of Carroll’s narrative. Carroll wrote Diaries between the ages of 12 and 16 while he was spiraling into his self-destructive hell. Reading his book is, in a sense, reading his diary; it is fragmented and disconnected, with short, vivid vignettes about Carroll’s experiences throughout the city. Carroll delivers his tale quickly and sharply, as though he has little time to tell it. The language is colloquial and bold, adding to the youthful New York aesthetic, and painting a clear picture of Carroll’s world for the reader. Some of this translates to the film even without the details, though the movie’s narrative is more structured and fluid, and the film doesn’t make clear some notable links, like Jimmy first embracing heroin at the same time he begins to eschew Catholicism.
What doesn’t fully translate to film is the extent to which the book makes the reader almost despise Carroll. Carroll puts all of his cards on the table, which, at times, makes you laugh with him and at other times makes you loathe him for sounding like a spoiled, self-indulgent, morally bereft jerk who had everything going for him and threw it all away. In the movie, Carroll is portrayed as a rough-around-the-edges kid who gets himself into a bad situation that continues to get worse. His behavior seems excusable due to the personal circumstances the film links it to, links that are more subtle in the book, and his conscience is periodically checked by a real life guardian angel, someone who doesn’t exist in his book. Instead, Carroll exposes himself as purely malignant at times, detailing him snatching purses from old ladies, stealing cars, having random sex, dealing drugs at school, and shooting up without a care as to the consequences to him or to those who around him. It becomes a bit harder to sympathize with Carroll, who continually writes about wanting to be “pure” and having his innocence taken away from him, when he doesn’t seem to make much of an effort to turn his life around. But this might be the whole point: the story repulses you and draws you in because it is shocking, but also because it’s real. At times, it makes you hate Carroll and all that he becomes as an addict, but, in a sense, it also reminds you that anyone can fall, and this is what it might look like if you do.
Perhaps this is why Carroll’s subsequent work didn’t experience the same literary acclaim as Diaries: when he cleaned himself up, he became a better person, and his writing reflected less casual savagery. Fortunately, Carroll went on to become an icon among the New York music and literary scenes as a poet, performer and member of the Jim Carroll Band, best known for his personal tribute, “People Who Died,” a song that appears in this movie, and one that could probably now use a final verse.
[I started writing this review in the hopes of finishing it for Literary Adaptations Week, but didn’t finish it. In light of Carroll’s death, I hope it doesn’t offend.]
Jessie V. is a student and violinist living in Reykjavík. She tumbls here.
