The end credits of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (2004), the remake of George A. Romero’s zombie classic that launched Zack Snyder’s career, were elevated by a punk song that entered as a blow of attitude after a heart attack ending and it played while the film extended its story with small clips recorded with a mobile to the rhythm of a letter that reviews the deaths of various people, it was ‘People Who Died‘.
Later, the screenwriter of that film, a certain James Gunn, would add the same song, also in the credits sequence, this time at the beginning, of his gore-filled superhero blockbuster ‘The Suicide Squad’ (The Suicide Squad, 2021 ), somehow closing a circle. Nevertheless, the song already appeared in a movie that became a cult movie in the 90sactor Leonardo DiCaprio’s starring debut, ‘Diary of a Rebel’ (1995), which adapted Jim Carroll’s autobiographical book ‘The Basketball Diaries’.
all my friends are dead
And the song appeared for a good reason, since it is the most famous theme of The Jim Carroll Band, the band of the author, whom Dicaprio embodies in his youth. Therefore, in the lyrics of the theme go morbidly reviewing the fate of several of his friends and acquaintancesas if Amaral’s song ‘Marta, Sebas, Guille y los otros’ had a macabre underside, a clear precedent also for ‘The Kids Are All Right’ by The Offspring, which they released on a record released two years after the premiere of the movie Did they take their inspiration from the classic?
It would not be strange, since the film was a great success at the time, taking the author’s text to a New York rather of the 90s, something inexplicable considering that everything happened in the 70s, and with a series of tics of the time that have left a generational mark which denotes a certain projection of the time to a target audience related to the age of the protagonists. The story, however, goes beyond the field of initiation cinema with its description of the fall from grace of a group of friends.
At times, Scott Kalvert’s film moves in the same sphere as other about life in the underprivileged neighborhoods of New Yorkrecalling the memories surrounded by mob like ‘A Bronx Tale’ (A Bronx Tale, 1993), Spike Lee’s cinema and the part of the past of the nearby ‘sleepers‘ (1996), rather than the exploitation of ‘Kids‘ of the same year, cultivating that air of inescapable tragedy as it draws us the antics of four boys snorting cleaning products, exchanging pornographic photos, carrying out thefts, getting into fights or hesitating neighborhood prostitutes.
Chronicles of a Junkie
On the other hand, there is a disturbing chronicle of life in a Catholic school, with the usual stigmas of repression and sexual abuse, in this case presented in such a normalized way and without bells which makes it something more stomachy and close to the perception of a teenager, close to what he could show ‘the devil’s toy‘ (1976). However, unlike other coming of age‘Diary of a rebel’ jumps from what it seems he wants to tell us to the spiral of drug addiction of the group of friends.
It only takes a few brushstrokes to perfectly establish the jump that is “going off the rails” from the everyday to hell, making both realities seem separated by a thin veilmore than an abyss, that is why the jump is also organic for the viewer, who without realizing it goes from small pranks to robberies and horse injections, with some of the most horrendous sequences of the subgenre of heroin perdition, moving forward a year to the monkey scene from ‘Trainspotting’ (1996).
Carroll’s withdrawal nightmare shares an almost documentary look with Danny Boyle’s, far removed from the anti-drug ad in ‘Requiem for a Dream’ (2000), although it does have some dream scenes that seem to have inspired Aronofsky, like the bathroom sequence, an unpleasant point of no return that seems like a future dream of the author, already trapped in a life that he cannot control. It is even more unreal in his structure, since it appears after a visit to his former coach, who tries to help him.
The early years of a cursed writer
‘Diary of a rebel’ ends in a diffuse way, andEntering the psyche of its author through the poetic tone of his lyrics, with many stretches of almost recited text, but it allows us to assimilate that the trip only serves to understand his work. There are also some segments that could not be filmed today, such as the slaughter fantasy of his entire class, with an outfit that preluded ‘Blade’ and ‘Matrix’, which exudes a macabre humor of its time, but today only sadly reminds of the Columbine shootings just 4 years later, whose perpetrators used to dress like Dicaprio in that scene.
In addition to a young Mark Wahlberg and Juliette Lewiswe also have a good handful of actors who would later stand out in ‘The Sopranos’, like the always emphatic Lorraine Braco and a budding Michael Imperioliwhich here makes Bobby, the most remembered protagonist of ‘People who Die’ in the phrase:
“Bobby got leukemia, fourteen years old, He looked like sixty five when he died, He was a friend of mine / Bobby had leukemia at fourteen, he seemed to be sixty-five when he died, he was a friend of mine”
‘Diary of a Rebel’ doesn’t tell the fate of all of Carroll’s song friends, but the excerpt of the fate that well awaits them serves to make the substrate where the letter was formed is as real as deathThat’s why the film is a document of survival, almost a story from the other side, offering us details and pieces of a reality that leaves little chance of escape, that’s why Dicaprio’s tears reflect the pain of an unconscious, stunned and absolutely lost and not the stellar moment of an actor looking to excite the public.