"The Basketball Diaries" - Reaction

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4 pages in length. Director Scott Kalvert's interpretation of Jim Carroll's book entitled The Basketball Diaries illustrates how drugs are all too often employed as a pinch hitter when life gets too hard to handle. Leonardo DiCaprio's performance of a promising Catholic school basketball player who - through a chain of temptation and bad choices - finds his life spiraling down at a pace faster than he can contemplate; heroin becomes the only thing that allows him to cope - or at least he believes this to be true in his distorted thought process, a pseudo-reality embraced by myriad adolescents caught in the grips of teen angst. At the core of this film is the obligatory lesson that drugs are not the panacea for what ails. Bibliography lists 4 sources.