MYSTERIOUS SKIN (A-)
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Elizabeth Shue. Directed by Gregg Araki.

*** REVIEW CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS ***

Sexual abuse stories have been told before. What distinguishes Mysterious Skin is how it is two stories, born of the same event and producing the same trauma but manifesting itself in opposite ways. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the first victim. When we meet him he’s already jaded, hardened, telling us flatly about the first time he ejaculated watching his mother engage in sex with her boyfriend. Brian (Brady Corbet) is the other victim. When we meet him he’s full of wonder and mystery, with fantasies about extraterrestrials. Their lives converge at one horrible moment with their little league coach, and then veer off again in wildly different directions. The dichotomy of these overlapping narratives is the heart of the film; it examines with keen insight how two different lives can fracture along opposite trajectories but towards the same end: both boys have deeply buried but are unable to escape their pasts.

The film’s only major error is favoring Neil’s story when the boys have grown into late adolescence. Brian’s story is one of introversion, all about fantasies, delusions, and gaping holes in memory. Neil is an extrovert, and that makes his story easier to dramatize — full of violence, anger, and a series of numbing sexual encounters. But Brian’s story is just as interesting, and the film loses a little bit of what makes the early scenes so transfixing: that back-and-forth contrast between boys who are unaware that they are telling the same story.

Of Neil, writer-director Gregg Araki gives us a series of scenes with johns, a few of them redundant, running the risk of making us as numb to them as Neil is, but others are unexpected and affecting. The best of these is an older man with lesions on his body indicative of AIDS. The scene is filled with dread as we wait for the inevitable trick-gone-bad that the film aggressively foreshadows, but instead it’s sad and tender; all the man wants is to be touched.

Meanwhile, Brian searches for clues to fill the spaces of missing time that he thinks hold the proof of an alien abduction. He encounters a fellow “abductee,” Avalyn Friesen (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a shy girl who lives on a farm and walks with a crutch. She’s a pitiable character, and a surprising scene between them suggests that maybe she has her own tragic reasons to believe in alien abduction.

But there were times where I wished Brian were better developed. Neil’s friend Eric (Jeff Licon) at one point describes Brian as “asexual,” but we see little of this in evidence during the film. Then later in the film is one of Brian’s most outwardly emotional scenes, an encounter with his absent father. Their confrontation is impactful, and it hearkens back to fleeting instances of father-son strife that we see at the beginning of the film, but of a man who was such a prominent figure during those harrowing years of Brian’s life we know surprisingly little. Watching it, I felt as though there were details missing and that Araki had not told us enough of their story.

Neil and Brian eventually reunite, and their convergence is a gentle meeting of Neil’s world-weary cynicism and Brian’s regressive innocence. I don’t know if their meeting is a step towards acceptance or just another stage of their tragedy, but it’s powerful and profound — these two boys, having denied their abuse in such different ways, have ended up in the same place, at the horrible memory that was the start of it all.