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A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has really been impressing me in many performances and films over the years ("Brick", "Manic", "Looper", "Don Jon", etc..), so I was surprised to find this 2004 film off HULU the other day- that I've never heard of-??"Mysterious Skin" was directed by Gregg Araki, who also wrote the screenplay based on Scott Heim's 1996 novel of the same name. The film tells the story of two pre-adolescent boys in the 1980s who are sexually abused by their baseball coach (Bill Sage, who I'm sure intentionally resembles a 1970s Robert Redford-??), and how it affects their lives in different ways into their young adulthood. One boy (Gordon-Levitt) becomes a reckless, sexually adventurous male prostitute, while the other (Brady Corbet) retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction.This is one of those little films that starts off slow, and you gradually find yourself becoming emotionally involved very heavily with it's two main characters- you begin to see and experience things from their eyes- almost to a scary level-??- so be warned, this movie is not for everyone... Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Lynn Rajskub and a very hot Elisabeth Shue round out the cast.

This movie does contain very explicit disgusting scenes, but in my personal opinion it is just daring to go where many others wont. It shows the effects of childhood abuse as an adult in different ways, and really rips apart the characters lives and souls scene by scene.An array of characters, who i believe are all fairly thee dimensional, and AMAZING ACTING. The truth is that it is hard to get something 'realistic' due to the subject area of the film - but i believe the writer really tried to understand how the characters would be shaped by their abuse.Some people say the film condones peodophilia etc and although i can see why someone could get that vibe at some parts its simply not true. He has obviously done research into the reality of child abuse and if anything is saying how catastrophic it can be for its victims whole lives.

Mysterious Skin is unlike the other Greg Araki films, as it doesn't feel like one, where normally there's crude humor within the drama, and sick violence, not to say The Living End, his debut was the other great one, where here he's climbed back up, and redeemed himself, in what is his best film. Alongside Palindromes, with it's pedophile themes, here this excellent films deals with the issues and scarring effects, it can have on one victim, that chiefly being of Corbett's innocent and slightly vulnerable character, that he wonderfully plays. Corbett is one of those really elite young actors, who I hadn't recognized years later as the plump psycho in the Funny Games remake. Here his character was abused as a kid by a baseball coach, spoiling him with lollies and taking him to R rated movies. One night he's punished, locked in a closet. Now in his teen years, he's having nightmares of alien abductions, where his only cure, could be going back to that of the past, revisiting his childhood, where he hunts down another of the victims, now a hustler, played by a take notice performance as seen in the great Joseph Gordan Levitt, who makes the movie his. His character sets no boundaries, picking up dirty old johns, one moustouched guy, also seen in Palindromes, another of that, being the creepy and evily smiling Billy Drago (check out his teeth). The film is a beautiful and poignant drama, and one of the more affecting films that deal with pedophilia, where to think it was initially in talks of being banned, that itself, is sick. Like these films, or ones that are banned, all together, these which are in denial of being shown, are crimes against cinema, for MS which luckily escaped a banning, was one of the best films and drama of 2005, where Mr Araki, should be proud to put his signature on. When our two long lost victims, finally meet which at first is, ugly, that last comforting scene, last moment, is one for the annals of cinematic memory. MS is a beautiful and dramatic Art house film which deserves bloody attention from all, with fantastic performances all around.

Here we have two boys, both narrating their memory of that childhood night that changed the universe.The film is about child molestation but it's not a 'message movie' up front, the hurt wrapped in something more weird about the hole it leaves in the soul.One boy goes on a teenage life of cheap sex that makes him feel desired, the other tries to piece detective-like the puzzle of what he's sure happened to him: alien abduction one night.It is more deeply about a hole in the memory of who you are, about missing time, wonderful stuff. The catch? We implicitly value ambiguity in films but it's not always clear why. My definition of ambiguity is of a simultaneous view, of things being both so and in some other way, this and not this. This means temporarily suspending judgement, to resist saying things are only one thing. Here we have it clearly, two stories that we're called to figure. So to get the full effect, the catch is that you have to be able to quickly juggle a whole cloud of mirrored story, to ambiguously hold how the two stories are about the same boy, that it's neither just this nor unlike it.In short, simultaneously hold how one narration may have splintered off in the other and both mirror the same pathway to mind, and whole sequences will open up as you watch, like the Halloween night that goes through masks and bullying in a 'scary house' and ends with a blurry passing-out.Suspending judgement extends in another way. We see stuff we could easily be judgmental of, a boy who prostitutes himself, a mother who's reckless of his pain, but see past just this without denying it and you'll see a soul in the same need of affection as the rest of us.You have to quickly get in that space because the filmmaker makes it gradually more clear until a protracted (literal) explanation in the end of one boy to the other of what actually happened that night that clears the air of confusion and restores painful clarity.So here's a film that takes after Lynch of his mid-period (that is until Mulholland), the sunny picture of middle-America that hides something, for a while attempts the same ambiguous blur of submerging cause to bring to the front images of its having been lived; the dreamlike opening shot of colorful cheerios raining on the smiling boy and we soon find out what that was a part of.In the end it falls back to the logic of explanations, clearly separating real and not. No mistake, it's the most difficult narrative challenge to pose on oneself, one that Lynch has been perfecting his whole career, so all told I'd rather celebrate here the imaginative attempt.I saw this with a previous film by the same guy, that one a critique as superficial as the TV walls it projected on. Here I'm happy to see him grow.