Teenager Jim Carroll is a drug-addicted high schoolbasketball player who regularly gets into mischief with his friends Pedro, Mickey and Neutron. He writes in his journal regularly. Jim's best friend, Bobby, is dying of leukemia; Jim visits him in the hospital and takes him to a strip show. Later, Bobby dies, and Jim and his friends attend his funeral. Following the funeral, Jim and his friends go to the basketball court and reminisce about Bobby's life. Depressed over Bobby's death, Jim begins to use heroin. At basketball practice, Jim's coach Swifty sees Jim in the bathroom, gropes him, and offers to pay him for sex. Jim refuses and pushes Swifty headfirst into a wall. Jim imagines shooting his classmates. The next day, before a game, Jim, Pedro, and Mickey take pills from Pedro's hat, hoping they are uppers. Neutron refuses the pills and confronts Jim about his growing drug habit. The pills are downers, and they cause the boys to perform disastrously during the game. A teacher tells Jim and Mickey that they are suspended for a week, and Swifty tells Jim he will never play basketball for his school again. Jim and Mickey quit the team and drop out of school, while Neutron stays. Jim's mother kicks him out of the house after finding his stash of drugs. Jim, Mickey, and Pedro break into a candy shop for money. Mickey finds a gun in the cash register and takes it. Hearing sirens, Jim and Mickey escape, but Pedro is arrested. Jim passes out in the snow high on heroin. Jim's friend Reggie finds him, takes him to his apartment, and forces him to detox. Back on the street, Jim is desperate for drugs and resorts to prostituting himself at a public restroom. Later, Jim and Mickey buy heroin, but discover that the dealer ripped them off. Enraged, Mickey corners the dealer on the roof of an apartment building. He accidentally pushes him off the roof to his death. Mickey tries to escape, but is beaten by a gang and then arrested; he is later tried as an adult and convicted. After escaping, Jim goes to his mother's apartment and she reports him to the police. Jim is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six months' incarceration at Rikers Island for assault, robbery, resisting arrest, and possession of narcotics and spends the time in jail getting clean. Jim approaches a stage door to give a poetry reading. He encounters Pedro, who has been released from reform school. Pedro offers him a bag of drugs, which Jim refuses. Jim recites his work before an audience and receives applause.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 45% based on 40 reviews and with an average rating of 5.02/10. The websites critical consensus states "In spite of its young leading man's heroic efforts to hold it all together, a muddled message prevents The Basketball Diaries from compelling as a cautionary tale." Metacritic gave the movie a score of 46 based in 19 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four. Ebert remarked: "At the end, Jim is seen going in through a 'stage door' and then we hear him telling the story of his descent and recovery. We can't tell if this is supposed to be genuine testimony or a performance. That's the problem with the whole movie."
Lawsuits
The film became controversial in the aftermath of the 1997 Heath High School shooting and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Critics noted similarities between those shooting attacks and a dream sequence in the film in which the protagonist wears a black trenchcoat and shoots six students in his school classroom. The film has been named in lawsuits brought by the relatives of murder victims. In 1999, activist Jack Thompson filed a $33 million lawsuit claiming that the film's plot caused the Heath High School shooting. The case was dismissed in 2001.
Soundtrack
The Basketball Diaries soundtrack was released in 1995 by PolyGram to accompany the film, featuring songs from Pearl Jam and PJ Harvey. AllMusic rated it three stars out of five.
