Leonardo DiCaprio - The Biography. Douglas Wight

      On set, the difference between Wahlberg and DiCaprio was clear to onlookers. While Wahlberg, then 24, had the self-awareness of someone who had already experienced the highs and lows of stardom in his career, Leonardo (five years his junior) still carried the air of someone who felt he was invincible.

      Marin offered a fascinating insight into Leo’s behaviour on set. He may not have had any concerns about the impact playing a heroin addict would have on his career, but he did fret about it getting out that he liked to smoke cigarettes.

      ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ DiCaprio asked Wahlberg, before he spotted the reporter was still watching. ‘Oh yeah,’ he then said. ‘I don’t smoke.’

      If Leo was worried about projecting the wrong image on set, he seemed less concerned away from filming. During down time on the shoot, he earned himself a reputation as a party boy, burning the midnight oil with late nights at some of New York’s most exclusive celebrity hangouts. Talk of his fling with model Bridget Hall might have cooled, but he was now being linked to Sara Gilbert, his old co-star on Roseanne, and also Juliette Lewis, with whom he had starred with on Gilbert Grape.

      Jim Carroll remembers DiCaprio’s discovery of the nightlife. ‘It was Mark Wahlberg who turned him on to the club scene,’ Carroll revealed to the Guardian. ‘The women who had come to The Basketball Diaries set – models, all these girls. He ploughed right through ’em, man.’

      Although the movie’s early drug scenes did not apparently faze Leo, a later scene – where he had to deliver a long monologue to an audience – did.

      ‘I can’t focus on doing really long speeches,’ Leo explained. ‘Looking out to an audience and trying to act at the same time, I sort of got dyslexic. And Lorraine Bracco [who played his mother in the film] was like, “It’s all right, calm down. It’s not that big a deal – do it tomorrow if you can’t do it today.” And it’s a tough thing – you get in a situation where you feel that you have to be perfect all the time and it sucks, it really does. Sometimes you just sit there and go, “Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to do!”’

      On release, The Basketball Diaries earned a respectable $2.5 million at the box office. While reviews were generally favourable, some suggested the poetry and heart and soul of the book had become lost in translation. However, Janet Maslin of The New York Times, wrote: ‘What saves the film from self-destructing entirely is Mr. DiCaprio’s terrifying performance during some of these latter episodes. One staggering, isolated scene shows a drugged-out Jim paying a desperate visit to his mother, played by Bracco, whose weepiness here isn’t one bit over the top. The wolf is, quite literally, at her door. Mr. DiCaprio’s demonic Jim pleads, wheedles, screams and tries to force the lock, begging his mother for money as he breaks her heart. That confrontation is worth the whole film.’

      And Jim Carroll had nothing but praise for Leo’s performance. ‘I saw the movie for the first time with Lou Reed,’ he said, ‘and he asked me if Leo had lived with me for two years, because he acted so much like me. Lou liked the movie – and he hates everything.’

      Carroll had even come round to the idea that Wahlberg was a useful addition after all, remarking that he had done a ‘good job’ in his portrayal of Mickey.

      By now there was a real buzz around Leo and he began to be linked to any major role, both fictionalised and those based on real people. Clamour grew that his next project might see him take on James Dean in a biopic of the doomed actor’s life.

      ‘You can see the comparison,’ says David Loehr, an archivist who ran the James Dean Gallery in the late actor’s hometown of Fairmount, Ind. ‘They’re both powerful young actors who made a big impact early and they both polished their craft for years before they became widely known.’

      But he added: ‘I have a whole file filled with people who were “the next James Dean”. None of them were. The ones who were successful were the ones who took some inspiration from Dean and added their own style, whether it was Maxwell Caulfield or Bob Dylan. I think DiCaprio is doing that.’

      Michael Ochs, an archivist and writer on popular culture, believed the Rebel Without a Cause star was ‘the logical reference point’ for Leonardo because of his looks. He said: ‘So far he hasn’t done anything that, to me, has anywhere near the intensity of Dean’s work. But he’s got the talent and by choosing roles that aren’t directly reminiscent of Dean, he avoids the comparison trap.’

      ‘It would be a huge challenge for anyone to play James Dean,’ says Loehr, who sent DiCaprio a Dean biography when he read about the movie discussion and received a note of thanks in return. ‘It might be impossible. That’s why I almost think it would be better to get an unknown to play him. But DiCaprio could be very good if he’s still interested, which at this point he may not be.’

      Despite the speculation, which reached fever pitch around the time The Basketball Diaries was released, Leo himself was having none of it.

      ‘I don’t believe any of it,’ he insisted. ‘I think about acting and the business all the time, that’s the truth – about roles, about whatever people are doing, what to do next. But as far as what people are saying about me, once in a blue moon I really think about it, you know; I really sit down and say, “Hey, is that true?” But it just doesn’t register because I read the stuff about me and it’s not who I am. It’s a cliché, but it’s like they’re writing about this guy that I’ve been made to be.’

      He might not have been ready to take on James Dean at that moment in his career but he was to find himself indelibly linked to that other tragic actor, River Phoenix. For his next role, Leonardo would replace Phoenix in what would be one of his most controversial roles yet.

      Incidentally, there is an interesting footnote to DiCaprio’s experience with The Basketball Diaries. The film was blamed in a lawsuit for inspiring the 1997 Heath High School shooting, when three students were killed after 14-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on a group while they were praying. Disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson included the movie in a $33 million action two years after the shootings, claiming the plot, along with two Internet pornography sites, several computer game companies, and the makers and distributors of the 1994 film Natural Born Killers, had caused Carneal to open fire. The case was dismissed in 2001.

      But the same year the film became embroiled in more moral panic, this time the resulting furore after the Columbine High School massacre. On that occasion two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold dressed in black trench coats and went on the rampage, killing 12 pupils and a teacher before killing themselves. Comparisons were made to a fantasy sequence in The Basketball Diaries depicting Leonardo’s character, wearing a black trench coat, shooting six classmates in his classroom. The movie was specifically named in lawsuits brought about by the relatives of murder victims – they were all, ultimately, unsuccessful.