In the following interview-essay, Williams offers background on Carroll's life and career with comments from Carroll on the occasion of the film release of The Basketball Diaries.

"I could get my shooting eye back," says Jim Carroll in a voice from the Borough of Lost Souls. "But that first step, man, that's the first thing to go." Carroll, at 44, still has the wounded-fawn cheekbones and red hair of the immortal adolescent. Thirty years ago, he was already a god in his small New York universe, a basketball star, literary prodigy, and fledgling heroin addict. That boy has been mummified in celluloid in the film version of his memoir, The Basketball Diaries, with Leonardo Di Caprio playing the stoned angel in a blazer and rep tie.

The actual Jim sits today in a Madison Avenue coffee shop, over rice pudding and apple-cinnamon tea, and looks back on his...