The Basketball Diaries

Jim Carroll's autobiographical cult favorite is the basis for this gritty film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll, a basketball star at a Catholic prep school whose promising future comes tumbling down when he gets addicted, first to glue-sniffing, then heroin. Mark Wahlberg, Lorraine Bracco and Bruno Kirby also star in this harrowing slice-of-New York-life. 102 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack: English Dolby Digital 5.1; interviews.

The pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jim Carroll, the poet and musician who spent much of his adolescence addicted to heroin and shooting hoops with fellow Catholic high school kids. As a biography, the film doesn't amount to more than the sum of its gritty scenes of smack use, violence, perversions (poor Bruno Kirby plays a lecherous coach who comes on to young Jim), and the usual scream-and-puke dramas that go along with a cold-turkey session. Director Scott Kalvert doesn't seem to realize that most people don't know who Carroll is and therefore can't possibly understand why they should care about his gutterball youth. DiCaprio, having nowhere to go with his performance but maintain Carroll's tailspin, is boring and redundant. Some kind of allusion to the literary and rock & roll life that follows the mess we're watching might have been helpful. --Tom Keogh