Basketball Diaries, The

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The tale related here isn't all that original, but the honest presentation lends impact to a wrenching scenario.

Washington Post Hal Hinson

It's a tough, intense, wrenching picture about drugs and growing up and surviving, driven by a fierce, skinless performance by its star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

[Kalvert] best serves the movie by simply focusing on DiCaprio, who communicates the spirit and blunt truth of the diaries even when the movie keeps trying to soften the blow.

Dallas Observer Matt Zoller Seitz

Kalvert and Goluboff overcome predictability by developing the film's characters and atmosphere instead. The result is a turbocharged ode to the lithe bodies and swaggering souls of boys who believe they're invincible - a glorious love song of youthful self-destructiveness.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's an energetic, watchable mess.

TV Guide Staff (Not Credited)

Jim Carroll's dreamy, pseudo-poetic memoir of a misspent New York boyhood - standard equipment for alienated adolescents of the 90s - is predictably re-tooled as an anti-drug message vehicle.

Empire Darren Bignell

Without rising star DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg this would have been considerably more turgid and unappealing. But their charm allows sympathy and involvement with the characters, despite their efforts towards self-destruction.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

A sensationalist grunge festival spiked with dollops of poetry on the sound track.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie is unconvincing. 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.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The results are more sleazy than insightful.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The Basketball Diaries is a weak-tea rendition of Jim Carroll's much-admired cult tome about his teenage drug addiction. Leonardo DiCaprio's committed lead performance deserves a better context than this gloss on the source material.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

The star shines, but the movie is hard to watch.

Chicago Tribune John Petrakis

It's more of a pastiche, a montage of brutality, a slow descent into Dante's Inferno until we reach the subbasement of a boy's soul. [21 Apr 1995]

Boston Globe Jay Carr

It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

San Francisco Examiner Gary Kamiya

Imagine if "On the Road" ended with Sal and Dean settling down in the 'burbs. Or if the carnal encounters in Henry Miller's "Sexus" were prefaced with admonitions to the reader not to "objectify" women. The Basketball Diaries is a similar travesty: It turns a celebration of outlaw life into a just-say-no cautionary tale that Nancy Reagan would love.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The Basketball Diaries is a stepped-on product that never scores.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The Basketball Diaries is a lose-lose proposition. Although it masquerades as a cautionary tale about the horrors of heroin, this epic of teen-age * Angst is more accurately seen as a reverential wallow in the gutter of self-absorption.

Washington Post Joe Brown

There's little momentum, no real story line, just Carroll's tediously inevitable descent from low to lowest.