Neil Baker explores teenage drug addiction on film and the socio-economic divides present between Beautiful Boy (2018) and The Basketball Diaries (1995).
Directed by Felix Van Groeningen, Beautiful Boy was the first of several addiction dramas to hit our screens in 2018/19. Van Groeningen was to offer us an emotionally charged yet tender film exploring the horrors of teenage addiction and the sheer power of unconditional love through the journey of a father and son battling a narcotic killer. Based on the memoirs of David Sheff (Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction) and Nic Sheff (Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines), Beautiful Boy chronicled a father (Steve Carell) attempting to support his son (Timothée Chalamet) as methamphetamines consumed his life.
Beautiful Boy would confront its audience with the stark realities of addiction through unflinching performances of remarkable depth and clarity, especially from Timothée Chalamet, who embodied the confusion, anger and pain of a boy running on autopilot, desperate to apply breaks that no longer functioned. However, while Chalamet sits front and centre, the real power comes from Carell’s portrayal of a father facing a situation out of his control as his son slowly drifts further away, while he desperately throws lines in an attempt to pull him back in. Here, Beautiful Boy explores the uncomfortable boundaries of parental love as multiple recovery plans fail.
However, unlike The Basketball Diaries, Beautiful Boy is firmly rooted in American upper-middle-class privilege, and it is here where Felix Van Groeningen’s film occasionally feels hollow. Addiction knows no socio-economic boundaries, but treatment does, and in Nic’s case, his family’s wealth and support undoubtedly play into his long road to recovery.
However, for too many in America, the reality of addiction is an absence of support due to poverty. The flip side to Nic’s journey can be seen in The Basketball Diaries, where DiCaprio’s Jim is left to find his own path out of addiction while being forced to feed his habit through crime and prostitution. However, these discussions on privilege feel absent from Beautiful Boy, and while every scene carries unrelenting power, that absence also creates a slight disconnect.
However, Beautiful Boy also excels in reflecting on the complexities of addiction, acknowledging the many relapses in the recovery journey and the sense of helplessness many parents face in supporting their children. Here, the film clearly aims to provide us with a series of discussions as we sit around the sofa, digesting the drama unfolding before our eyes. It achieves this goal in spades thanks to Carell and Chalamet, even if its discussions of inclusive healthcare, regardless of an individual’s background, are sadly absent.
Long before Timothée Chalamet’s gut-wrenching performance in Beautiful Boy, Leonardo DiCaprio brought us an equally powerful portrait of teenage addiction as the young Jim Caroll in The Basketball Diaries (1995). Both films explore the pain and complexity of adolescent addiction twenty-four years apart from different sides of the socio-economic tracks.
In The Basketball Diaries, Jim comes from a single-parent household in a challenging inner-city neighbourhood where opportunity and hope are scarce. In contrast, Timothée Chalamet’s Nic in Beautiful Boy is a young man born into privilege, his options in life an open door, and his addiction a fall from grace. While both films expertly navigate the darkness, isolation and stark realities of addiction and the long journey to recovery, the danger of the cliff edge faced by both boys couldn’t be more different. Beautiful Boy focuses heavily on therapy, while The Basketball Diaries focuses on community and individual action, highlighting the wealth divide in treatment and recovery.
Could the socio-economic differences between the two films have affected their critical reception on release? Beautiful Boy was widely praised, while The Basketball Diaries suffered a critical mauling. The answer is complicated; in the mid-90s, there was still a commonly held view that addiction and drug-related crime sat within the social underclass of cities, despite earlier films such as Less Than Zero’s attempts to change the conversation. More often than not, the middle and upper classes were seen as victims of addiction and crime, while the lower classes were viewed as having brought it upon themselves due to their lifestyle. Since the release of The Basketball Diaries, these social attitudes to addiction have changed. So why did The Basketball Diaries fall into obscurity?
Scott Kalvert’s film offers a profoundly unsettling viewing experience by constantly challenging the audience with many deep-seated realities of addiction that were and remain taboo. Based on the 1978 memoir by the poet and musician Jim Caroll, The Basketball Diaries relocates the book’s 1960s setting to 1990s inner-city America, providing a timeless commentary on inner-city poverty, addiction, and entrapment.
In The Basketball Diaries, we watch young Jim (DiCaprio) and his friends struggle to find their way out of the poverty of opportunity that engulfs them, turning to crime, drugs and prostitution for money. Here, the boy’s run-down neighbourhood, failed education, and drug-fuelled street scene provide little opportunity for escape; their only route out is held within the hope that someone may spot their creative talents or sporting abilities. The city neighbourhood that Jim and his friends call home is, to all intents and purposes, a prison, with drugs the only quick and easy mental escape.
On its release in 1995, many were quick to criticise The Basketball Diaries for its shock tactics and for the controversial themes of school abuse that run through Jim’s journey. Many of these scenes continue to haunt the film today, especially Jim’s dream of walking into school with a loaded gun, an uncomfortable omen of what was to come just four years later in Columbine.
At this point, The Basketball Diaries would vanish into obscurity, only to reappear many years later with significant cuts. But these scenes serve an essential purpose, as Kalvert unpicks the isolation and rage of young people who are told they are worthless by a society that views them as mere fodder. While this may be disturbing, it is also a reality for many inner-city kids with nowhere to go and no one to fight their corner but themselves.
In The Basketball Diaries, there is no therapy or expensive rehab, just self-help and a community willing to support young people in the state’s absence. Roger Ebert commented on this by saying: “Jim is saved by a noble black man, who finds him unconscious in a playground, brings him home and puts him through cold turkey (in stories like this, you can always count on a heroic black ex-junkie, scouring the streets for troubled white kids who need to get whupped into shape; there’s just not the same cachet in being saved by a white dude)”. I greatly respect Ebert, but he seemed to lose the plot here.
The Basketball Diaries openly challenges the stereotypes surrounding race, drug addiction and inner-city crime. We do indeed have a white boy saved from disaster by a black man. But why wouldn’t that be the case? Ebert clearly didn’t reflect on the racial profiling of the time or the stereotypes that haunted inner-city black Americans. Ernie Hudson’s Reggie takes Jim under his wing, knowing that the road to recovery will be challenging and uncertain. He does precisely what someone else did for him years before; his race is not central to this, but his kindness and need to give back are.
In Beautiful Boy, much emphasis is placed on the parents’ role in offering unconditional love. Similarly, The Basketball Diaries explores the relationship between Jim and his mother (Lorraine Bracco). But unlike Beautiful Boy, Jim’s loving mother also has to contend with poverty alongside her son’s slow fall into addiction. Here, The Basketball Diaries is at its most heartbreaking as it unpicks the choices that parents of low-income families face in attempting to help their kids.
When Jim’s mother decides she can no longer help her son and needs to close the door on her support, he pleads for money and scratches at the door, begging her to let him in. The sheer emotional power of this goodbye leaves me numb to this day, as his mum realises she can no longer support him without losing the small amount of comfort she has worked so hard to achieve.
Twenty-four years after its release, Jim Caroll’s story challenges us to unpick the root causes of inner-city drug addiction by exploring the wealth divide in addiction treatment. There are no expensive therapists or plush residential treatment centres, just the loving hands of community members who know they are the last hope for a young person on the verge of permanent collapse. Maybe this reality is still too close to home for many, which is why films like Beautiful Boy attract critical attention while movies like The Basketball Diaries vanish from view.
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