The Basketball Diaries (1995)

The primary message of the film is that drugs are bad and will destroy people with good intentions. Even before he turns to drugs, young Jim is beset by concerns and problems associated with his life as a student and a basketball player. He has a close friend who is dying of leukemia, for instance, and a coach of the basketball team makes sexual advances on some of the players. Jim is also afflicted by the usual teenage sexual angst, but it is the appetite he develops for heroin that destroys his dream of becoming a basketball star. He soon moves from the basketball court to the dark streets of New York, a place where he can hide from his mother's growing concern for his welfare. Then, he can no longer g

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rom being a basketball hero to jumping into the Harlem River in a suicide attempt. He has exchanged his lascivious coach and mildly abusive teammates for the underworld of New York, with its drug users, pushers, hookers, and pimps. His mother has participated in her own way by throwing him out when he falls. Jim is presented as a sensitive individual demonstrated by his penchant for writing poetry--overly romanticized and maudlin poetry, of course, as might be expected of an adolescent, but poetry that helps him express himself and escape from the problems of the real world at the same time. The context in which Jim begins taking harder drugs is a culture that seeks happiness immediately through the use of whatever drug is needed to accomplish this. Some use alcohol for this purpose, while others need something harder. The coach seeks happiness by abusing his students. Jim's poetry does not make him happy as he hopes it will, and he begins taking harder drugs until he does achieve a sense of happiness, as he says, because "any ache or pain or sadness or guilt was completely flushed out." The game of basketball is presented as if it were a drug in the beginning, and Jim and his friends can escape through basketball, escap
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1348
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)