The Basketball Diaries
New Line Cinema | Release Date: April 21, 1995 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
46
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 19 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
8
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The tale related here isn't all that original, but the honest presentation lends impact to a wrenching scenario. Read full review
80
Washington PostHal Hinson
It's a tough, intense, wrenching picture about drugs and growing up and surviving, driven by a fierce, skinless performance by its star, Leonardo DiCaprio. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter Travers
[Kalvert] best serves the movie by simply focusing on DiCaprio, who communicates the spirit and blunt truth of the diaries even when the movie keeps trying to soften the blow. Read full review
70
Dallas ObserverMatt Zoller Seitz
Kalvert and Goluboff overcome predictability by developing the film's characters and atmosphere instead. The result is a turbocharged ode to the lithe bodies and swaggering souls of boys who believe they're invincible - a glorious love song of youthful self-destructiveness. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
It's an energetic, watchable mess. Read full review
63
TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)
Jim Carroll's dreamy, pseudo-poetic memoir of a misspent New York boyhood - standard equipment for alienated adolescents of the 90s - is predictably re-tooled as an anti-drug message vehicle. Read full review
60
EmpireDarren Bignell
Without rising star DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg this would have been considerably more turgid and unappealing. But their charm allows sympathy and involvement with the characters, despite their efforts towards self-destruction. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
A sensationalist grunge festival spiked with dollops of poetry on the sound track. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
The movie is unconvincing. 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. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
The results are more sleazy than insightful. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleEdward Guthmann
Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished. Read full review
50
The New York TimesJanet Maslin
The star shines, but the movie is hard to watch. Read full review
50
VarietyTodd McCarthy
The Basketball Diaries is a weak-tea rendition of Jim Carroll's much-admired cult tome about his teenage drug addiction. Leonardo DiCaprio's committed lead performance deserves a better context than this gloss on the source material. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneJohn Petrakis
It's more of a pastiche, a montage of brutality, a slow descent into Dante's Inferno until we reach the subbasement of a boy's soul. [21 Apr 1995]
38
Boston GlobeJay Carr
It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]
25
San Francisco ExaminerGary Kamiya
Imagine if "On the Road" ended with Sal and Dean settling down in the 'burbs. Or if the carnal encounters in Henry Miller's "Sexus" were prefaced with admonitions to the reader not to "objectify" women. The Basketball Diaries is a similar travesty: It turns a celebration of outlaw life into a just-say-no cautionary tale that Nancy Reagan would love. Read full review
20
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
The Basketball Diaries is a stepped-on product that never scores. Read full review
20
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
The Basketball Diaries is a lose-lose proposition. Although it masquerades as a cautionary tale about the horrors of heroin, this epic of teen-age * Angst is more accurately seen as a reverential wallow in the gutter of self-absorption. Read full review
10
Washington PostJoe Brown
There's little momentum, no real story line, just Carroll's tediously inevitable descent from low to lowest. Read full review
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