Drama manages to illuminate pedophilia's scars
The hip-deep nihilism of Gregg Araki's earlier movies - The Living End, The Doom Generation - is nowhere to be found in Mysterious Skin, a deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.Based on a novel by Scott Heim, and bearing a passing similarity, plotwise, to Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, Araki's Mysterious Skin is set in a Kansas town where kids play Little League and grown-ups go all-out for the Halloween trick-or-treaters. Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is a troubled teen whose childhood was plagued with nosebleeds, blackouts and nightmares. Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the Third Rock from the Sun alum), by contrast, seems confident - recklessly so - in his sexuality (he's gay) and his place as a cool outsider in the sleepy, Plains-state burg.
The hip-deep nihilism of Gregg Araki's earlier movies - The Living End, The Doom Generation - is nowhere to be found in Mysterious Skin, a deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.
Based on a novel by Scott Heim, and bearing a passing similarity, plotwise, to Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, Araki's Mysterious Skin is set in a Kansas town where kids play Little League and grown-ups go all-out for the Halloween trick-or-treaters. Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is a troubled teen whose childhood was plagued with nosebleeds, blackouts and nightmares. Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the Third Rock from the Sun alum), by contrast, seems confident - recklessly so - in his sexuality (he's gay) and his place as a cool outsider in the sleepy, Plains-state burg.
Toggling between the two characters, and flashing back a decade to their respective grade-school days (Chase Ellison and George Webster play Neil and Brian, respectively, at age 8), Araki shows how each was seduced and molested by his Little League coach (Hal Hartley regular Bill Sage), and how their paths into adulthood were shaped by the experience.
Brian has no memory of the pedophilic episodes of which he was victim; instead, he believes he may have been abducted by aliens. After watching a TV show about UFOs, he meets with a nearby farm woman who claims to have been taken by extraterrestrials.
Neil thinks of his relationship with the coach as his first romance; now he hustles for money, hanging around the baseball field as traveling salesmen pull up and invite him back to the motel. His single mother (Elisabeth Shue) is loving but lost in her own world, her own problems.
With a crisp, clean photographic style and elements of gently mocking comedy, Mysterious Skin manages to deal with its raw, awful subject matter in ways that are both challenging and illuminating.
Mysterious Skin
*** (out of four stars)
Written and directed by Gregg Araki. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet and Elisabeth Shue.
Running time: 1 hour, 39 mins.
Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (pedophilia, nudity, profanity, sex, adult themes)
Playing at: Ritz Five