To hell and back with a teenage heroin hero: an uncomfortable contemporary transplant of the Jim Carroll autobiographical cult novel. (Can we look at shared needles in the Nineties without thoughts of AIDS?) It does not avoid the danger of so many junkie war stories, of sounding as much like a boast as an admonition: a cameo appearance by Carroll himself proffers, in addition to his personal benediction on the project, living proof that you can hit rock bottom and still resurface as a Cool Dude; and a printed coda enumerates his subsequent attainments as a poet (a little belied by the unappetizing samples recited in the course of events), novelist, musician, and performance artist. The deeper the descent, the correspondingly cruder the cinematic technique. Cruder, and tricksier: a slow-motion dream scene of a Terminator-style shotgun assault on a Catholic-school classroom; a fish-eye closeup of an unhealthy heterosexual submitting to a paid blowjob in a public men's room; etc. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Lorraine Bracco, Ernie Hudson, Juliette Lewis; directed by Scott Kalvert. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd