PAGE TO SCREEN : Rim Shots

Jim Carroll’s “The Basketball Diaries” is a hip and happening “Catcher in the Rye.” Originally published in 1978, it details the author’s coming of age on the streets of New York during the 1960s. Carroll was a onetime basketball star, compulsive diarist, long-haired hippie, poster boy for teen sex, periodic truant and precocious substance abuser, starting with cleaning fluid and working his way through beer, grass, codeine, uppers and downers, and, finally, junk. The junk, of course, eventually necessitated a radical lifestyle change, alienating him from his family, his friends and his school and compelling him to knock over old ladies, steal cars and hustle men to support his habit.

The book is both appalling and appallingly funny. It works because Carroll is as interested in the world around him--in New York--as he is in himself.

It is not, however, an easy book to adapt for the big screen (the movie is being released on April 21, with Leonardo Di Caprio as Carroll). It’s loaded with incident, but it’s episodic and doesn’t go anywhere but down. For director Scott Kalvert and screenwriter Bryan Goluboff, one of the biggest problems is that there are no sympathetic authority figures. Carroll doesn’t have much to say to his parents or his teachers or his coaches or his priests. So one of the first things the filmmakers did was create a fictitious character, Reggie, who tries to help Carroll out. The irony, says Goluboff, is that “people who love the book come up to me and say, ‘Yeah, Reggie was my favorite character in the book. You really got Reggie right.’ ”

The members of Carroll’s posse aren’t exactly real either. They are composites. And the one member who is authentic, Bobby, is given much more weight than in the book. His death from leukemia is depicted as one of the defining moments of Carroll’s life, setting him on the road to nowhere. Kalvert scoured the book with an eye toward such a moment and found it with the help of his own experiences growing up.

“I had a friend when I was 8 years old,” he says “and we were ‘skitching,’ holding on to the bottom of a car, and he slipped and the wheel rolled over his head and he died. It messed me up and changed the way I thought.”

Carroll agreed with Kalvert’s intuitive take on Bobby’s death and on the script in general--which is not surprising, since Kalvert had internalized much of the book even before coming to the project. He says that reading it when he was a troubled kid saved him from making the same mistakes Carroll did. In fact, the point of the movie is Just Say No, without the Reaganesque platitudes and moralizing, though this emphasis makes it an all too familiar--if brilliantly acted and uncompromising--exercise in cold turkey.

Some of the other changes, however, couldn’t be helped. As often happens when characters are set in motion, these achieved a life of their own, pulling the story away from the original material. This explains why the movie most closely adheres to the book at the beginning. As Goluboff laughingly says of the whole process, “We adapted our (tails) off.”