The Basketball Diaries

I can't get enough of 'The Basketball Diaries' (1995), the film adaptation of author Jim Carroll's wild and destructive teenage life (I highly recommend reading Carroll's autobiography; it's very different). Jim goes from being a talented basketball player to a strung-out heroin addict. The heroin consumes him completely and he'll do anything, and I mean anything, just to get a taste of it. Nothing is more important than the high it gives him. The addiction throws him into a horrifying downward spiral and it seems that he will never breakaway from it.

The one thing that makes 'The Basketball Diaries' watchable on more than one occasion is Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in it. He's truly a gifted actor and displays a varying spectrum of emotions in a realistic fashion. His performance in this film is one of his best. I like the way he delivers the insightful poetic lines in the film, particularly the ones written by Carroll himself. The rest of the film can basically be written off, the other characters aren't as well-developed and the acting done by the majority of the others just isn't that great. See this film for Leo's performance and accept the other stuff because his performance overpowers the parts with the crap acting that is done by some of the others.