Leonardo DiCaprio might have been born in 1974, however he was made within the Nineties. Over the course of only a few years, DiCaprio went from complete unknown to family title. Everybody remembers the Oscar-nominated flip as a learning-disabled youngster in What’s Consuming Gilbert Grape; his function as Claire Danes’s star-cross’d paramour within the whizzy, revisionist Romeo + Juliet; and, after all, Titanic, that unsinkable behemoth of a romantic blockbuster. Fewer individuals, nonetheless, are more likely to bear in mind The Basketball Diaries, launched 30 years in the past at this time. However that movie endures as a curious detour for the actor – the apex of DiCaprio’s hurriedly aborted “dangerous boy” period.
For a lot of the primary half of The Basketball Diaries, DiCaprio’s insouciant athlete is sort of a caricature of a teenage insurgent: he fights; he smokes; he steals; he smoulders. An early scene sees him hunched over on the entrance of a classroom, receiving a strong rear-end paddling from a starchy Catholic schoolmaster. The bell rings. “Too dangerous, Father,” DiCaprio’s character smirks. “I used to be simply beginning to get pleasure from myself.” He and his delinquent cronies (James Madio, Patrick McGaw, and a just-out-of-Funky-Bunch Mark Wahlberg) then skive off college for the day; we watch as DiCaprio perches on the again of a shifting bus, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
The movie veers into darker territory, as DiCaprio’s character turns into hooked on heroin and lives on the streets. It’s all in all one thing of a combined bag: erratically paced, self-consciously edgy, and lacquered with histrionic cliché. Put this along with the movie’s meagre industrial efficiency and it’s unsurprising that The Basketball Diaries islittle greater than a footnote within the scheme of DiCaprio’s profession. (It could in actual fact be greatest recognized for a dream sequence depicting a faculty taking pictures, which later prompted lawsuits within the wake of two real-life shootings.) Nevertheless it’s noteworthy simply how uncommon it was to see DiCaprio discover a personality this smarmy and obnoxious.
Not too lengthy after The Basketball Diaries was launched, DiCaprio signed on to Woody Allen’s Superstar – one other occasion of his apple-cheeked persona breaking dangerous. (Again within the Nineties, Allen movies have been after all a massively engaging proposition for any actor, not fraught with ignominy as they’re at this time.) The shiny black-and-white comedy forged Kenneth Branagh as an archetypical Allen nebbish, and DiCaprio, in a supporting function, as a bratty and mercurial A-lister. By that time, DiCaprio and his social circle (a bunch of younger, principally male celebs together with Tobey Maguire, future Entourage star Kevin Connolly, and the magician David Blaine) have been the topic of serious tabloid consideration. Superstar’s metatextual overtones have been exhausting to overlook – scorching younger famous person DiCaprio taking part in scorching younger famous person Brandon Darrow – even when the extremity of the character’s hotel-room-trashing behaviour was a fabrication of the movie.
The late Nineties additionally noticed a protracted dispute over Don’s Plum, a weird and ugly indie movie starring DiCaprio, Maguire, and different members of their pal group (who styled themselves, if tabloid stories have been to be believed, because the “p***y posse”). It’s maybe the grimmest iteration of DiCaprio’s edgelord part; one second sees DiCaprio’s character yell at Amber Benson that he’ll “f***ing throw a bottle” at her face, calling her a “goddamn wh***.” The movie was panned by critics, however its launch was infamously blocked, with its actors claiming to have participated within the understanding that they have been making a brief movie, not a characteristic.
There could be different roles for DiCaprio that loosely match the “dangerous boy” remit – his thrill-seeking globetrotter in The Seaside had parts of this, actually – nevertheless it by no means performed to his strengths. (He was almost forged because the lead within the 2000 adaptation of American Psycho – a prospect that might have actually put his capability for nastiness via its paces.) Within the Nineties, he was outlined by a kind of boyish, approachable-but-not-too-earthy confidence; it’s what makes his Romeo, and the plucky Jack in Titanic, such profitable romantic leads. He appears an excessive amount of the gorgeous boy to be a pure match for malignity, and it’s no shock that the 2000s noticed him largely pivot again to extra likeable leading-man roles.
From the very offset, DiCaprio has by no means actually been an actor with a inflexible persona. It’s vital that his breakthrough – taking part in the learning-disabled Arnie in What’s Consuming Gilbert Grape – was a definite, mannered efficiency, extra befitting a “character actor” than a film star. Because the Nineties progressed, and he turned just a little extra constant in his selections, his forays into antiheroism can maybe be seen as an effort to withstand Hollywood’s pure pigeonholing. Later in his profession, he would department out into scumbaggery with larger success, in tasks akin to Django Unchained and The Wolf of Wall Avenue.
Right here’s a coincidence for you: The Basketball Diaries is in actual fact certainly one of two completely separate tasks by which DiCaprio is spanked with a paddle. The second is 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, whereby DiCaprio’s character – a spineless, egocentric and dimwitted poisoner – is given a paddlin’ by his uncle (Robert DeNiro) in a masonic ritual.
The distinction between these two scenes is definitely reasonably illuminating. In The Basketball Diaries, we watch DiCaprio’s character bear the punishment with a form of defiant cheek we’re supposed to search out charming. In Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s a foolish and embarrassing spectacle for all concerned. Watch DiCaprio in any current movie, and it’s noteworthy simply how uninterested he’s in preserving his personal dignity. It’s a shamelessness that he hadn’t but mastered again within the days of The Basketball Diaries, and even Superstar. In one thing like The Basketball Diaries, we see the seeds of the performer that DiCaprio would at some point turn into. He simply needed to wait a few many years for these seeds to sprout.
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