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Mysterious Skin | 112944__mysteriousskin_l
'SKIN' CRAWLER The impact of abuse leaves very different craters in two boys
MYSTERIOUS SKIN: Lacey Terrell/Tartan Films
Presented by Moviefone

Credits

Limited Releases: May 20, 2005, May 06, 2005; Length: 99 Minutes; Genre: Drama; With: Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
B+
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

Gregg Araki has always been a filmmaker of extremes — wilder! kinkier! campier! more! — so perhaps it took a subject as extreme as pedophilia to move the director of The Doom Generation into creating his first work of feeling. In Mysterious Skin, two 8-year-old Kansas boys are abused in the summer of 1981 by their Little League coach (Bill Sage), a practiced seducer of children who has the creepy look of a jock–turned–Chippendales dancer. The boys are marked in opposite ways: Brian (Brady Corbet), who entirely blanks out his night of hell, grows up into a stunted pasty nerd, convinced that he was abducted by aliens. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the coach's ''favorite,'' suffers both less and more, becoming the most insolent of teen hustlers, and Gordon-Levitt, who has the horsey, mean-eyed sensuality of a Larry Clark pinup, gives a remarkable performance. Mysterious Skin dawdles more than it flows, but it comes alive whenever Araki, hovering between tragedy and voyeurism, reveals how sex can tear lives to pieces.


Posted May 11, 2005
 

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