Mysterious Skin (2005)

Image credit: MYSTERIOUS SKIN: Lacey Terrell/Tartan Films

'SKIN' CRAWLER The impact of abuse leaves very different craters in two boys

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.