MYSTERIOUS SKIN
Directed, Written & Edited by: Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim.
Produced by: Mary Jane Skalski, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte & Gregg Araki.
Director of Photography: Steve Gainer.
Music by: Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie.
Released by: Tartan/TLA Releasing.
Language: with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: USA. 99 min. Not Rated.
With: Brady Corbet, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michelle Trachtenberg, Jeff Licon, Bill Sage, Mary Lynn Rajskub, & Elisabeth Shue.

Brian, a bespectacled eight-year-old boy, can't account for five hours he's lost. He was playing in a little league game and then woke up later alone in the dugout. Seven years later, Brian (Brady Corbet) has grown up to be a withdrawn teenager fascinated by UFOs. (At least alien abduction offers an explanation.) Another boy his age, Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), vividly and fondly reminisces on his childhood. At age eight, his first love was his handsome baseball coach (Bill Sage), a walking '70s Playgirl centerfold, who seduced Neil after practice. While Brian has only one confidant, an awkward fellow UFO-phile, Neil is the leader of a small clique, made up of Wendy, a goth, and Eric, who is as proudly and openly gay as Neil. It's obvious by the way that Eric looks at Neil that he has a crush, so much so that Wendy warns him that Neil "has a bottomless black hole" instead of a heart. And although Neil wouldn’t know Brian if he were to see him, he holds the key to Brian’s past.

After school, Neil turns tricks for cash, confidently waiting in a deserted park for a car to pull up. The best part of the film is the series of Neil's exploits, which are explicit but not exploitative. In these encounters, director Gregg Araki vividly captures the furtive loneliness of gay life in a hick town. Neil flees to the big city once he's graduated from high school, and in contrast to Kansas, he finds New York City men to be in a whole different league. Again, the film's most moving, frank, and gripping moments occur here as he plies his trade.

Mysterious Skin makes Midnight Cowboy look tame in comparison. Gone is the coyness about sex from Araki's earlier films. The film's sexual bluntness overshadows the uplifting and rather low-key ending. Araki retains, though, his signature dialogue of glib, sitcomish one liners, especially as delivered by Jeff Licon as Eric. However, both Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt are not only convincing, but hold up the film when other actors are self-consciously awkward. The casting of a hunk as a predator is a departure from type (like Brian Cox in L.I.E.), but told from the boys' frightened and bewildered point of view, the film hardly sanitizes or eroticizes the coach's actions.

The determined and aloof Neil follows the downward footsteps of other screen prostitutes, such as Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas (who, perhaps not coincidentally, plays Neil's oblivious mother). He pays a punishing physical price when one john turns brutal. That's the only subtle judgment made upon the two central characters. Being an openly gay teenager as well as boldly sexually voracious, Neil is by the far the film's most colorful character. The fact he lives in a conservative small town in the 1980s begs for more screen time about how he lives, not just in bed, but in everyday life. Kent Turner
May 6, 2005