Sunday Matinee #131 The Basketball Diaries

Why we help and why it's hard to accept help.

The Basketball Diaries | 1995
IMDb | Letterboxd | RRMC
Context: Jim Carroll (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a high school student whose heroin addiction has turned everything upside down. An acquaintance named Reggie (Ernie Hudson) takes him in, forcing his body to detox. Jim struggles and refuses, so Reggie shoves him into a mirror to see what he’s become. This moment comes at 1:30 in the clip:

Reggie: Look at yourself! Just look at yourself!
Jim takes a good hard look. He’s ashamed of what he sees.
Jim: …Oh, Reggie!
Reggie: It's okay.
Reggie leads Jim away from the mirror to start his road to recovery.
Jim: Why are you doing this?!
Reggie: Because once upon a time, somebody helped me, and I always pay what I owe.

Luke 10:25-37 | EnterTheBible.org
Fifth Sunday After Pentecost | 07.13.2025
Context: While teaching the crowds, an expert in the law asks Jesus some seemingly trick questions. Not letting him off the hook, Jesus offers a parable – a teaching story – about a person in need of help and a question about who is willing to help.

“A Samaritan while traveling came upon [the man in the ditch, left for dead by his attackers], and when he saw him he was moved with compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, treating them with oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him, and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.’”

Commentary:

I don’t know a single person who is excited to need help. Let alone ask for it.

Jim Carroll (Leonardo DiCaprio) spends much of this movie spiraling out of control. He goes from mischievous to malignant the more that drugs control his life. Despite a drive to be a loyal friend, play good basketball, and shine creatively through his poetry, drugs simply consume Jim. Soon enough, he loses everything. Friends die, he’s suspended from school, he’s banned from basketball, and he’s kicked out of his home. When he hits rock bottom, the only thing he finds there is what brought him there in the first place: heroin.

He thinks it helps, but it doesn’t.

Earlier in the movie, Jim met Reggie (Ernie Hudson) and they played a pick-up basketball game. Later, Jim is passed out in the snow, high out of his mind, and Reggie takes him in. But not just for a bowl of soup. Reggie knows what drugs are doing to Jim because he’s been there himself. He does everything he can to help Jim detox in his tiny apartment. It’s a brutal scene, made all the more gruesome by excellent acting performances.

Jim refuses to be helped until he has absolutely no choice.

Even then, the impact on his body makes him resist. Reggie’s reasons for helping Jim are telling. He’s met Jim and he knows the road he’s on. He’s been in the ditch himself. He knows what it takes to get out of it, and that it’s seldom by just climbing out on your own. Helping Jim comes at great personal cost to Reggie, yet it’s Reggie’s compassion that compels him to help. Jim has been beat up and left for dead by his heroin addiction. While many people have tried to help Jim along the way, perhaps it’s Reggie’s own personal experience with how drugs robbed him that fuels that compassion for someone else. In fact, he even says someone once helped him get out of his ditch, and “I always pay what I owe.”

Giving help and receiving help always comes at a cost. It can be a worthwhile cost.

In the parable Jesus tells, we don’t get much backstory to any of the people involved. We don’t know why this man was traveling the treacherous road to Jericho alone and vulnerable. We don’t know why these robbers laid in wait for yet another victim without so much as a second thought to preserving life. We don’t know exactly why the two people who passed by the man in the ditch went on their way (much ink has been spilled on this, but ultimately, that’s not what’s important here). We don’t even know why the Samaritan stopped to help, save for one thing: “he was moved with compassion.”

Did the Samaritan sympathize, wondering what it would feel like to be that man in the ditch? Did he empathize, because he had once been in the ditch himself, like why Reggie helped Jim? It’s not likely he stopped to help so this man would be in his debt or so he’d look good to the innkeeper or to repair relations between two groups of people with centuries of distrust. Compassion isn’t the fuel for those sorts of motivations. Compassion comes from knowing life has its roads and its ditches and what you do can make a difference.

When has the personal cost to help someone been worth it? When has the personal cost to help been too great for you to safely be able to help someone? When has someone helped you, and did you have to ask?

The Basketball Diaries has always been a controversial movie. You can read many substantial critiques of how the film depicts sensitive topics like drug addiction, school violence, religion, and yes, there is much to critique. What I appreciate the most about the film is the very real hope that for as many people as possible, rock bottom is not the end. There is indeed resurrection.

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Glad you were here today. God’s peace and good movies to you!