In the film The Basketball Diaries (Scott Kalvert, 1995), the subject is not sports but drug abuse and the way a young man descends into the hell of drug use on the streets. The main character is a member of a winning high school basketball team, but more and more his life comes to center not on the basketball court but on the streets where he can make money to buy drugs. He dreams at first of being a basketball star, but soon he no longer dreams and only seeks to escape through drugs. The film makes use of a number of themes related to rugs and drug abuse in developing its image of the downfall of this one young man, though the film is not fully successful and only presents its story without really developing an explanation or tying the themes to the world at large.
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 go home, and his only escape from reality is the heroin that put him on the streets he fears in the first place.
The story told in this film is ultimately a story of redemption as Jim begins to find the road back to sanity and home. He manages this with the help of his friend Reggie. The film develops ideas about the positive and negative aspects of drugs, and in some ways the positive and negative aspects merge by the end of the film. What Jim thinks is...