"Mysterious Skin"

This film about two boys who've been sexually abused has an odd buoyancy -- and a remarkable performance from a young ex-sitcom star.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jun 17, 2005 | The sexual abuse of children is such a potent subject that anyone who attempts to make a work of fiction about it -- whether it's a book or a movie -- ought to be required to get a license first. It's far too easy for an artist to gas up on dime-store victimology, or, worse yet, to keep his story running on the fumes of cheap pathos. But Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin," which traces the intertwining but distinctly different strands of how two young men deal with their shared history of sexual abuse, doesn't fall into either of those traps.

The film has a weird buoyancy -- it's not a light picture, and it does include a harrowing (adult) rape scene. And it doesn't diminish the suffering of either of its two lead characters. But Araki doesn't make "Mysterious Skin" -- which was adapted from Scott Heim's novel -- about suffering; it's really a picture about getting on with things, about the freeing benefits of coming to terms with the past instead of being a slave to it.

The picture opens in the early '80s, in a small Kansas town. Its two main characters, Neil and Brian, are 8-ish boys, both Little Leaguers, when we first meet them. Brian (George Webster), blond and bookish-looking, with huge, owl-like glasses, is lousy at baseball; Neil (Chase Ellison), an elfin mischief-maker with dark eyes and a bowl haircut, is good at it, and he has also become the favorite of the team's coach (Bill Sage), a strapping hunk of a guy with the generic good looks of a '70s underwear model.

The coach -- we never even learn his name -- pays lots of special attention to Neil (the child of a single mother, played by Elisabeth Shue), inviting him over to play video games and filling him up with the sugary cereals his mom won't let him have at home. The coach's attentions are obviously inappropriate, and they only become more so. But while Neil is puzzled by the things the coach wants from him, he also thrives on the attention. The scene in which the coach seduces Neil is shot in a way that's both horrifying and hypnotic -- it has a dreamy quality that only intensifies its power. We recoil at what's happening to Neil, but we also understand completely why he responds to it.

Neil becomes a hustler by age 15. (The teenage Neil is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt of "Third Rock From the Sun.") He hasn't blocked out or denied what happened to him, but he also hasn't given a thought to how it's shaped -- or, more accurately, screwed up -- his life. Brian (Brady Corbet), on the other hand, reaches adolescence without figuring out what happened to him (and we don't know, either, until the end of the movie). He's blocked out the episodes of abuse, but he does suffer from nightmares, bed-wetting and recurring nosebleeds. Because of things he's read and seen on TV, he decides that as a kid he was abducted by aliens, a theory that's completely off the mark and yet entirely apt -- child abusers seem like shape-shifters who have taken the form of trustworthy humans.

Next Page: Even at age 8, Neil knows he's gay

• View blog reactions