No Escape
In a tale of child abuse, time doesn't heal.

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Bill Sage, Elizabeth Shue
Based on the novel by Scott Heim
Adapted for the screen and directed by Grek Araki

IT SHOULD DISTURB US a little extra that the two boys at the center of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin are by now archetypes in the literature of the gay Bildungsroman: They're any combination of sad, lonely, isolated, detached, repressed, promiscuous, careless, and victims of abuse at the hands of older men.

The fact that one of them brings his own nascent carnal desire to his pre-adolescent sexual abuse is the more intriguing story here, and Araki (The Living End), adapting a novel by Scott Heim, tells it on the periphery. But most of what we witness in Mysterious Skin is an elegy to a world where gay teen-agers have to construct fabulist metaphors for their difference, or else simply live behind a sullen force field that doesn't protect them from the most dangerous things.

One of the boys is Brian (Brady Corbet), who at 8 years old is a flop on his first day of Little League, which his soon-to-be-absent father compelled him to play, and which his overly protective mother suspected was unsafe. Brian comes home with a bloody nose that initiates a 10-year series of nosebleeds, bed wettings and blackouts. And on the night of his humiliation, he sees a spaceship in his backyard, which convinces him that he's been abducted by aliens.

The other boy is Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose eighth year is also important: He has his first orgasm whacking off as he watches his mother (Elisabeth Shue) servicing her current big dumb boyfriend, the kind of man who becomes Neil's "type" when, by age 15, he's a hustler. Neil knows his sexual destiny. He wants his coach (Bill Sage) on the first day of Little League, and soon he becomes the coach's favorite among all the boys.

There are no healthy young libidos in Mysterious Skin, just the sickness of men who buy lean young lads, sometimes to have gentle sex, sometimes to rape them, and in the case of one older man - his body pocked with tell-tale lesions - simply a desire to have Neil touch and massage his skin ("the safest sex you'll ever have," he reassures him). This is either a transcendent moment or a slightly contrived one, depending, I guess, upon your taste for the horrifyingly bittersweet.

Araki films the molestation scenes in a way that seems to protect his child actors: You never actually see the coach's face and a child's face in the same shot when the coach does something bad to the child, like putting his head on the boy's belly (we see a torso but no child actor's face), or performing oral sex (discreet dialogue and editing imply what's going on), or requiring a boy to put his little arm into his rectum up to the elbow. (Are you getting the idea of what to expect if you choose to see Mysterious Skin?)

This is interesting, although perhaps cold comfort to those of us who wonder how parents and artists explain films like this to the children who appear in them. (TV's Law & Order: SVU is especially guilty of putting kids through some wrenching scenes in which they discuss sexual corruption.) One only hopes that Araki created a sufficient world of make-believe for Chase Ellison and George Webster, the children who play Brian and Neil at age 8 before Corbet and Gordon-Levitt step into the roles.

Mysterious Skin takes place in small-town Kansas, which doesn't have much significance (by which I mean it could happen anywhere). But the fact that the boys are 8 in 1981, and 18 in 1991, sets the story at a time when children like them understood less about their situations and had fewer places to turn for good advice. The story brings the boys together in the end, and its climax wraps things up a little too neatly, although certainly not happily or with any bright horizon. Its metaphors glide along at first and then begin to sputter, like a Gus Van Sant movie. My Own Private Idaho naturally comes to mind, except that Araki is far more tangible that Van Sant will ever care to be.

You won't find any positive gay role models in Mysterious Skin, which is about as perfect a film as anyone could hand to the religious wrong to preach against on Sunday morning. And so we have to bring our own positive understanding to what we see, which we can, fortunately, because we've seen this drama's various elements before. We understand, without any insinuation, the reason for Brian's alien abduction, which makes him feel like a stranger inside his own skin. He sees Neil in his dreams about aliens, and he says, "He looks like he knows something." And of course, Neil does - even more than we think he knows, considering what he does to make money.

What emerges from this all is a cool, leisurely, episodic and occasionally moving character study of Neil, a gay teen-ager who doesn't have anyone to guide him through his sexual maturation, and who makes many bad choices because of that absence, and to a lesser extent, Brian, whose sexual desire is never perfectly clear to us (we do get inclinations), and whose situation leads to an ending that's at once vaguely made-for-TV and yet probably just right.