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Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jim Carroll, the poet and musician who spent much of his adolescence addicted to heroin and shooting hoops with fellow Catholic high school kids. As a biography, the film doesn't amount to more than the sum of its gritty scenes of smack use, violence, perversions (poor Bruno Kirby plays a lecherous coach who comes on to young Jim), and the usual scream-and-puke dramas that go along with a cold-turkey session. Director Scott Kalvert doesn't seem to realize that most people don't know who Carroll is and therefore can't possibly understand why they should care about his gutterball youth. DiCaprio, having nowhere to go with his performance but maintain Carroll's tailspin, is boring and redundant. Some kind of allusion to the literary and rock & roll life that follows the mess we're watching might have been helpful.
--Tom Keogh
Leonardo DiCaprio plays a high-school-age Jim Carroll, a New York kid who wears a dirty grin, scoffs at his teachers, reduces his mother (Lorraine Bracco) to tears, and hangs out with a bunch of friends, looking for trouble; when they can't find it, they make it. Early on, the picture offers some fine, flowing scenes of the gang tearing down the street with all the zip and glee of Truffaut kids, and loping and shoving, angular and energetic, across the basketball court. But when Jim discovers heroin-and the film finds a sense of responsibility-the freedom disappears: the latter half becomes a gruelling catalogue of cold nights, blue lips, and scummy needles. DiCaprio gives it everything he's got, but the picture doesn't ask him for much; it isn't interested in his good humor, let alone his good looks. Directed by Scott Kalvert, scripted by Bryan Goluboff, and based on Carroll's own chronicle of his wasted youth, it's all too pleased with itself for getting down into the gutter. The final sequence makes it plain that because Carroll now writes poetry he is cured, and redeemed. That's what he thinks, anyway. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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