
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 6, 1995                   TAG: 9505090073
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`BASKETBALL DIARIES' SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO THE BOOK

Jim Carroll wrote what came to be known as "The Basketball Diaries" between the ages of 13 and 18, while he was growing up on the streets of New York and playing basketball for his Catholic high school in the mid-1960s.

His coming of age - and becoming a junkie - occurred simultaneously, and his experiences are recorded in the diaries with precocious wit and wisdom and poetry, offering some insight into the warp and woof of artistic genius.

He grew up terrified of Catholicism and imminent nuclear holocaust, but found comfort in basketball, his diary and, finally, drugs. The diaries do not apologize for the writer's life and that's one of their chief virtues: as a matter-of-fact document of self-destruction.

The people involved in the new Leonardo DiCaprio film, "The Basketball Diaries," ought to have had one-eighth of Carroll's courage when they decided to make a movie out of the book. Apparently they were worried that a straightforward approach to the subject matter of the diaries would have glamorized drug use. And, oddly enough, they chose to place the story in the present - as if "Generation X" would find nothing to relate to in Carroll's story set against the backdrop of the tumultuous '60s.

So they ran scared, straight into the always-welcoming arms of Moralizing and Simplifying, and came up with a movie that offers very little that is different from previous movies about drug addiction, sheds little light on the main character and is, ultimately, predictable.

It's not DiCaprio's fault. He is, as he was in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?", excellent, a totally captivating combination of innocence and inscrutability. The trouble is with the screenwriting and direction.

Obviously it was necessary to impose a narrative structure on the diaries. But in the process, writer Bryan Goluboff overstates certain causal factors in the Birth of the Drug Addict. Mourning the death of a friend, Jim is shut down at the confessional when he tries to talk about his grief. As for his friends Mickey (Mark Wahlberg aka Marky Mark), Pedro (James Madio) and Neutron (Patrick McGaw), they don't want to talk about what it means to lose Bobby : They just want to get drunk.

So Jim's slide is accelerated. He's kicked out of school for being high during a game. His mother (Lorraine Bracco) kicks him out of the house, etc., etc.

Director Scott Kalvert - another music video crossover, unfortunately - provides images without style or thematic purpose. A fight scene looks like a gangsta rap video. A bathroom scene looks like a Scope commercial. And the ending looks like a commercial for Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

And the subtlety and poetry of Carroll's diaries?

Better read 'em yourself.

The Basketball Diaries

Rated (R) for profanity, sexually explicit material and vivid vomit. An Island Pictures release, 1 hour and 42 minutes, showing at the Grandin Theatre.

by CNB