The Basketball Diaries

“The true story of the death of innocence and the birth of an artist.”

Nobody can say exactly when it starts, only that Jim Carroll (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a promising high school basketball player and writer who has begun to slip into heroin. Scott Kalvert, in his first feature, adapts Carroll's own autobiographical novel and keeps Jim's friend Neutron (Patrick McGaw) and his mother (Lorraine Bracco) close by. Each time Jim says he can stop, the claim sounds a little more like a favor he is asking of himself.