Sorry, this movie sucks

Expected more

Best movie ever!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Absolutely loved this movie. This might be Leo at his best (sans Gilbert Grape). Easily could have turned into an after school special, but Kalvert walks this line brilliantly. In addition to Leo, this might be Wahlberg's best performance (sans Boogie Nights). It's a dark disturbing tale, that is told through bold and authentic performances.

I like how the main theme of this movie kind of creeps in quite at the middle of it and then drastically emphasizes itself into a great conflict with the main character's own self. The other ideas of friendship and loss are also addressed nicely although with less emphasis and duration. The ending proves to be quite a good one, despite there is less footage of the process endured in the prison. From the acting side, I really like how Leonardo DiCaprio showed a great totality in acting here. He can really nail, although not perfectly, all the physical conditions a junkie with demanding addiction would do. Mark Wahlberg acted out also quite a nice performance, despite the posture of his body quite nags. How can a high school age kid have a bodybuilder's chest and abs like that?

This film isn't for everyone, you either hate it or love it. It sometimes lacks that constant up-beat easy to watch feel that certain types of audiences need to enjoy a film and is replaced with brutal honesty.The performances from all of the actors were outstanding, with Leonardo DiCaprio performing some of the best acting I have ever seen. His portrayal of Jim was so real and raw that he gave so much of himself to the role that it began to look effortless. So many scenes in this movie were beautifully done. A few stand out moments to name: The basketball scene in the rain, every confrontation between Jim and his mother, and the Withdrawal scene where once again Leo gives a spine tingling performance. If you want to enjoy The Basketball diaries you must go into it with an open mind and take the film for what it is. It isn't a fancy, modern, stylized, glamorized film about drugs but rather an honest, raw, bold and touching movie about the self-destruction of a boy who falls head first into the harrowing world of drug addiction. This movie for me is an overlooked, underrated piece of art. Which is why I love it. I wouldn't change one thing about it.

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries tells in tattered detail how the author went in a few short months from being a Catholic high school basketball star to being a strung-out heroin addict who turned tricks for drugs. Like many such stories, it hangs fondly over the shock and repulsion, and ends with unbecoming quickness after contentment is recovered. Will there ever be a venue for a film about a character who skips through his drug period because he's so excited to show us what he did after he pulled his socks up? Not likely. If there's anything more tiresome than a scandalous parable with a lesson at the end, it's the lesson minus the parable.And so this reverential flounder in the sewer of narcissism shows us profusely that if you become addicted to drugs, you're prone to discover yourself living distraughtly on the streets, selling a body that looks increasingly less like a worthwhile purchase. Carroll was a kid who notwithstanding his misery attempted to develop his experience into prose. The snag with Scott Kalvert's film is that he's apt to translate the experiences too literally: Jim is so urgently pale and miserable that the idealism feels vain. He plays basketball at night in the rain after his best friend dies of leukemia, and it just looks wholly contrived, fake and banal, not poignant.As the film begins, Jim is on the basketball team at a Catholic high school in New York, where a depraved priest drools while spanking disobedient students with a full-size paddle and the class cringes rhythmically. This scene's more indebted to Victorian pornography than to any real private school in 20th century America. Jim and his friends are not upright Catholic boys. They steal from the lockers of the opposing basketball team, and the preferred off-court activity is experimenting with inhalants and pills. Swifty, the coach played by Bruno Kirby, makes implausible passes at Jim. And Jim's mother, played by a sadly wasted Lorraine Bracco, is a crudely flat character who functions here exclusively to implement tough love by kicking him out.Life for Jim is a descending coil of pills, cough medicine, booze, diving off cliffs into the Harlem River, fainting during a game and masturbating on the roof. There are also stirring gleans into the underbelly of users, pushers, hookers and pimps, as Jim floats at large from his comfort zones, while recording all in his diary. Jim's writing predictably operates as a narration. Like most poetry written by teenagers, it's childish idealism, agonizingly earnest, seeing life as sad because the writer's not happy. Soon though, he samples heroin, and "any ache, pain, sadness or guilt was completely flushed out." Remarkable, how real life unravels exactly like the movies.The movie hinges on three hard-wearing formulas: Jim facilitates his dying friend's temporary escape from the hospital so he can push his wheelchair down 42nd Street, Jim sees his ex-teammate on TV playing in an all-star game while Jim is in a squalid bar and, of course, Jim is rescued by a dignified black man, who finds him out cold, brings him home and puts him through cold turkey. In accounts like this, you can continuously rely on a laudable black ex-hoodlum, combing the streets for distressed white kids, functioning for white tolerance soap-boxing purposes as hidden supplies of authenticity and honor.DiCaprio does what he can with the role. Ernie Hudson is solid as the ex-junkie, and there is genuine feeling in Bracco's underwritten mother. But it's Juliette Lewis, as a greasy hooker, who once again taps an utterly real edge. But the movie is not credible. By the end, Jim is seen going in through a stage door, and then we hear him telling the story of his decline and recuperation. We can't determine if this is intended to be actual acknowledgment or a show: That's the whole movie's trouble.While the film has a preachy earnestness more like older films that take drug issues in hand, its mercilessly murky concentration on the despair of drug abuse makes for effective, gripping viewing, if only for purely morbid interest. The teen years, an age of revolt and insecurity in the best of conditions, can be shocking when an individual gets that carried away. This stark, muddled film depicts this, with reductive prurience indeed, but also with brutalizing efficacy.