Sperminator 2

The Basketball Diaries (1995)

Rated: R

Runtime: 102 minutes

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg

Director: Scott Kalvert

Plot: Jim Carroll (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a basketball star at St. Vitus Catholic high school. He likes to get paddled, plays basketball like a cheetah, and writes a lot in his notebook. Mickey (Mark Wahlberg) is also a basketball star at the same school. He likes to take a dump before the game. Jim and Mickey and a couple of other guys in their gang spend their days smoking, huffing, and talking about how they could beat Wilt Chamberlain. Jim becomes friends with heroin and his world begins to fall apart.

Rating—out of 5 basketballs: 2 ½  basketballs. ½ for the recommendation (it’s not really a basketball movie but it’s pretty good), 1 for the soundtrack, and 1 for Michael Rapaport stumbling onto the wrong set for a day.

Tournament seed: 5–9—movie is favored to win its first game in the tournament and has a good chance to win a second game. But depending on the team it is matched up against, could be an early upset. Be sure to do your research before choosing.

I can’t wait to watch the movie The Heroin Diaries.... I’m guessing it will have all the basketball action that The Basketball Diaries did not. The only “basketball action” this movie has (mostly from DiCaprio and Wahlberg) consists of goofy layups and tricky passes. Oh, and a never-ending game Jim plays with Reggie (at one point DiCaprio dunks!), and a sweet game of shirtless 2-on-2 in the rain with Jim, Mickey, Pedro, and Neutron. Before I go any further, I should mention that there are several characters in this movie that are “important” to the plot, but their stories are never really explored. Reggie is a friend of Jim’s that he shoots hoops with at the playground; Pedro and Neutron are friends of Jim and Mickey. Neutron breaks from the gang about halfway through the movie, and becomes a high school All-American basketball player, Pedro becomes a lifetime junkie. There is also Bobby (he has leukemia and is Jim’s best friend), Coach Swifty (he either wants to blow Jim or have Jim blow him ... it’s a little unclear), and Diane (a fellow junkie that suddenly gets clean ... I think?). So as I said before, the movie is lacking in basketball. To fill up the 102 minutes, it tackles weird sex stuff and drug use. Some of the highlights: Coach Swifty’s advice to the team of “No smoking and no pulling your peckers before a game”, Jim bragging about breaking Bobby’s record of choking it seven times (I’m guessing in a day?), Jim taking Bobby to a peep show but Bobby not being able to get hard, and Jim doing some drugs and then having sex with either Blinkie or Winkie (again, something that is unclear). These events lead to the downfall of superstar Jim. Jim’s mom kicks him out of the house, and he, Mickey, and Pedro take to the streets to live with the other junkies. Along the way they rob an ice cream parlor, Jim passes out in the snow, and Reggie saves him and gets him clean for a while. But then Jim gets back with Mickey, gets a bj from some guy in a bathroom, buys some bad drugs for himself and Mickey from some guy, which leads to Mickey pushing the guy off the roof. Mickey gets arrested, Jim runs back to his mom for money, she says no, calls the cops, and he cries like a baby. Mickey gets 5-15 years, Jim gets 6 months ... but he gets clean in prison. Yay! Pedro, sadly is last seen still on the streets, doping. Boo!

The movie was released in 1995, so there were some cool mid-nineties things: a soundtrack with songs by hip artists Pearl Jam, PJ Harvey, and Soundgarden. The Doors were on there too (always cool), and the song “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band. Yeah, you read that right. See, the movie is based on Jim Carroll’s troubled teenage years. He became a famous writer and punk rock star. There was a dream sequence in the movie that Jim had where he enters his school and shoots up some classmates. This caused the movie to be blamed for future real-life school shootings later in the decade. The coolest mid-nineties thing, though, was Michael Rapaport’s appearance in the movie. The only explanation I could come up with was that he wandered off the set of Higher Learning (also released in 1995) and onto the set of this movie, because he plays a Nazi skinhead in both.

Leo does an awesome job of making sure I learned stuff even though he leaves me short of the basketball action I wanted: the going rate for a bj from a junkie in 1995 is 15 dollars, Jesus Christ would have loved the flaming bag of shit prank, taking drugs before a basketball game is not a good idea, and finding money in New York is like getting laid at the prom ... easy (I disagree). Oh, and there was something in the movie that I already knew:

Jim: “Time sure flies when you’re young and jerkin’ off.”