Mysterious Skin (2005): A-

Free of the stylistic show-offery of his prior work, Gregg Araki’s magnificent Mysterious Skin charts the divergent paths of two teenagers – emotionally remote, unbearably cool gay street hustler Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and nerdy, reclusive mama’s boy Brian (Brady Corbet) – as they attempt to cope with the lingering effects of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by their Little League coach (Bill Sage). Years after their traumas, Neil remains certain that the coach’s actions were born of love while Brian, having almost fully blocked memories of the event, becomes convinced that he was abducted by aliens and falls into a relationship with a supposed abductee (Mary Lynn Rajskub). The boys exist as two sides of the same tarnished coin, one meek and the other self-assured, but both deliberately mired in a state of denial in which carefully constructed fantasies function as their primary means of expressing pain, embarrassment and anger over their pasts. Araki utilizes womb imagery, a healthy dose of signifiers regarding childhood and innocence, and his usual array of pop culture references for his fractured flashback-saturated story (adapted from Scott Heim’s novel), creating a real-and-yet-also-unreal sense of psychological dislocation. And Gordon-Levitt’s performance is nothing short of astonishing, exuding equal measures of hungry sexuality and destructive alienation in crafting an unsettling vision of teenage confusion and longing.

Comments

[scott]

thanks for this swell review! I'm reading all of these...

[Nick]

Glad you liked the review, Scott. But are you really planning on reading every review on this site? If so, more power to you, but that might take a while...

[Max]

Mysterious Skin had all the right elements for Gregg Araki to pull off. It was more art and personal. The eye contact of each character was very emotional for me. By steering into their eyes put's you more in the movie...like you were in the very room hiding in the closet peaking out or, behind the drapes or looking through a door key hole at things that you just would be shocked to have witnessed!

It is that shocking...looking at two boys being molested and watching them grow after that experience! Both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet had pulled off remarkable fighting believable performances in the very edgy get mad at and cry over heart wrenching story of two young boys give over to an adults sex perversions leading then to a down spiral teenage life of hopelessness.

The whole cast in this movie were brave enough to have given breath and life to a film subject that many would probably not want to see. The churchgoer will completely not understand Gregg Araki’s work here at all.
It's is not a movie to be condemned...but a movie to be praised for showing the truth about just how some butt hole of little towns can be filled with this kind of sin as any major city......God help all the children that are faced with this sought of evil right now...Thank you Gregg Araki for a wake up call...