Padme's Library: 🏀📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘🏀: The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll

Friday, March 22, 2024

🏀📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘🏀: The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll

Summary:

The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball

Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960s, set during his coming-of-age from 12 to 15, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving streets of New York City. During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence. Here is Carroll prowling New York City--playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, getting hooked, and searching for something pure. The Basketball Diaries was the basis for the film of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

"I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation. . . . The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty." -- Patti Smith

An autobiographical account of poet and rock musician Jim Carroll's delinquent high school years, during which he excelled playing basketball for a boy's club team, meanwhile hustling to support his growing heroin addiction.

Release Date: April 21, 1995

Release Time: 104 minutes

Director: Scott Kalvert

Cast:

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim Carroll

Lorraine Bracco as Mrs. Carroll

Marilyn Sokol as Chanting Woman

James Madio as Pedro

Patrick McGaw as Neutron

Mark Wahlberg as Mickey

Roy Cooper as Father McNulty

Bruno Kirby as Swifty

Alexander Chaplin as Bobo

Juliette Lewis as Diane Moody

Michael Imperioli as Bobby

Michael Rapaport as Skinhead

Ernie Hudson as Reggie

Manny Alfaro as Manny

Cynthia Daniel as Winkie

Brittany Daniel as Blinkie

Jim Carroll as Frankie Pinewater

Ben Jorgensen as Tommy

Jim Carroll

James Dennis "Jim" Carroll was an author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. Carroll was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which was made into the 1995 film of the same name with Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll.

Carroll became sober in the 1970s. After moving to California, he met Rosemary Klemfuss; the couple married in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce, but the two remained friends.

Carroll died of a heart attack at his Manhattan home on September 11, 2009, at the age of 60. At the time of his death, he was in ill health due to pneumonia and hepatitis C. He was reportedly working at his desk when he died. His funeral mass was held at Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village.