"You just gotta see that junk is just another nine-to-five gig in the end," wrote Jim Carroll in "The Basketball Diaries" way back in 1978. Perhaps no film about heroin has captured that grinding routine of score-shoot-nod-hustle-score as well as "Heaven Knows What" — and it's easy to see why. The film's lead actress, Arielle Holmes, was herself a 19-year-old junkie living rough on the streets of New York City.
A chance meeting with filmmaker siblings Benny and Joshua Safdie resulted in them motivating Holmes to turn her experiences into a story; she spent days on end standing at Apple stores typing out her (soon to be published) memoirs called "Mad Love in New York City," and the Safdies were impressed enough to make a film of it.
Holmes cleaned up so she could act on a daily basis, and the film was shot on the streets of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan with a cast that includes both Holmes' street crew as well as actors with firsthand experience of the drug scene. You know those wild-eyed street people you see shouting at each other while holding garbage bags full of lord-only-knows-what and looking like they haven't taken a bath in months? That's the cast.