The Basketball Diaries (film)

Summarize Fact Check

Teenager Jim Carroll is a drug-addicted high school basketball player who regularly gets into mischief with his friends Pedro, Mickey and Neutron on the streets of New York City and at school. Outside of basketball, Jim shows an artistic interest in writing; keeping his work in his journal while expressing his thoughts and creating poetry.

Jim's best friend Bobby is dying of leukemia, and Jim frequently visits him in the hospital. After a trip to a strip show cut short by an annoyed Bobby, he dies, and Jim and his friends attend his funeral. Following the funeral, Jim and his friends go to the basketball court and reminisce about Bobby's life. Depressed over Bobby's death, Jim begins to use heroin.

At basketball practice, Jim's coach Swifty sees him in the locker room showers where Jim is taking a short break to get high, and he gropes Jim and offers to pay him for sex, a proposal Jim forcefully declines. As Jim's frustrations with school and life grow with time, he imagines shooting his classmates. The next day, before a game, Jim, Pedro and Mickey take pills from Pedro's hat, hoping they are stimulants. Neutron refuses the pills and confronts Jim about his growing habit. The pills are downers, and they cause the boys to perform disastrously during the game. Father McNulty, who notices the boys engaging in drug use, tells Jim and Mickey that they are suspended for a week, while Swifty tells Jim he is now banned from playing basketball for his school again. Jim and Mickey, in response, resign from the team and drop out of school, while Neutron remains.

After exposing his stash of drugs, Jim's religious mother disowns him and exiles a depressed Jim from their apartment. Jim, Mickey and Pedro now live only for their next score as homeless addicts. In one instance, they break into a candy shop for money, where Mickey finds a gun in the cash register and takes it. Hearing sirens, Jim and Mickey escape, but Pedro, too high and hungover to realize the situation, is left behind and arrested. Jim continues a desperate life of shady dealings and getting high with Mickey, and by the coming winter, Jim passes out in the snow while high on heroin. Jim's friend Reggie, who, having been in a similar situation, sympathizes with Jim over his predicament, finds him, takes him to his apartment, and forces him to painfully abstain and detox. But Jim relapses, and he takes money from Reggie for more drugs before leaving.

Back on the street, Jim is desperate for more drugs and resorts to prostituting himself at a public restroom. At one time, Jim and Mickey buy heroin but discover that the dealer ripped them off. Enraged, Mickey corners the dealer on the roof of an apartment building and accidentally pushes him off the roof to his death. Mickey tries to escape but is beaten by a gang and arrested. He is tried as an adult and convicted.

After escaping, and with nowhere else to go, Jim returns to his mother's apartment, begging for money. She is tempted to give him some, but she reluctantly reports him to the police instead. Jim cries uncontrollably before two police officers arrive and drag him into custody. Jim is convicted and sentenced to six months incarceration at Rikers Island for assault, robbery, resisting arrest and possession of narcotics. While there, he spends much of the time writing in a diary and getting clean.

Six months later, Jim approaches a stage door to give a poetry reading. He encounters Pedro, who has been released from reform school. Pedro offers him a bag of drugs, which Jim refuses. Jim later recites his work before an audience and receives applause.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 46%, based on 41 reviews, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The websites critical consensus states: "In spite of its young leading man's heroic efforts to hold it all together, a muddled message prevents The Basketball Diaries from compelling as a cautionary tale."^[8] Metacritic gave the movie a score of 46, based on 19 reviews, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.^[12]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two stars out of four. Ebert remarked, "At the end, Jim is seen going in through a 'stage door' and then we hear him telling the story of his descent and recovery. We can't tell if this is supposed to be genuine testimony or a performance. That's the problem with the whole movie."^[13]

The film became controversial in the aftermath of the 1997 Heath High School shooting and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Critics noted similarities between those shooting attacks and a dream sequence in the film in which the protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio) wears a black trenchcoat and shoots six students in his school classroom. The film has been named in lawsuits brought by the relatives of murder victims.^{[14][15][16][17]} In 1999, activist Jack Thompson filed a $33 million lawsuit claiming that the film's plot (as well as two internet pornography sites, several computer game companies, and makers and distributors of the 1994 film Natural Born Killers) caused the Heath High School shooting. The case was dismissed in 2001.^[18][19]

Summarize Fact Check

The Basketball Diaries soundtrack was released in 1995 by PolyGram to accompany the film, featuring songs from The Doors, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, The Cult and PJ Harvey. AllMusic rated it three stars out of five.^[20]

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