Mysterious Skin (2004)

Premise: In the summer of 1981, two boys are molested by their little league coach (Bill Sage). Ten years later, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) turns to hustling, while Brian (Brady Corbet) believes he was abducted by aliens. As Brian begins to remember Neil's presence in the abductions, he seeks Neil out for answers.

You know that feeling you get when you've had way too much to eat, and you know that your stomach's not happy about it because the food is sitting there like a stone?

That's how this movie feels, for hours and even days after you see it. It haunts the back of your mind, appearing in little quiet moments of your day-to-day to chill you to the bone.

And yet, in the midst of all this weightiness, Gregg Araki (writer-director) deposits the most unexpected joy: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (henceforth JGL). I've only seen him in a handful of comedic roles prior to my Wednesday trip to the Bytowne, so this one naturally took its toll on me.

On the other hand, I finally understand what critics mean when they call a performance a "revelation." This, my friends, is a revelation. JGL gives one of the most unrelenting, powerful, poignant, and harrowing performances I've ever seen. It weighs all the more heavily on me that he can do that at two years my senior, looking for all the world like disenchantment, false-bravado, and that "I'm too sexy" swagger will somehow erase his feelings of loneliness and utter banality.

As Neil's mom, it's easy to chalk Elizabeth Shue's performance up to simply filling out a necessary single mother requirement, but, at the last possible second, Shue lets on that perhaps she knows much, much more about her son and his life than she wants to believe is real.

Corbet works to make his character's delusions as ingrained as possible, and it's no wonder that meeting a fellow abductee Avalyn (Mary Lynn Rajskub) finally awakens Brian to the startling truth. Rajskub and Araki give the audience just enough to hint to Sarah at a forced hysterectomy and to me that Avalyn's repeated "abductions" have more do to with her barely glimpsed "over-protective" father than anything else.

Allow me to almost completely ignore Wendy (Michelle Tranchtenberg) and Eric (Jeff Licon), Neil's hometown friends. Tranchtenberg did little besides annoy me with Dawn's simpering ways through three years of Buffy (although she did allow Xander to deliver one of the show's Best Monologues Ever) because I felt she was basically playing the same unblinking, "precocious" kid that Dakota Fanning annoys me with now (since when does some sort of strange disease that causes you to be unable to close your eyes signal precociousness, anyway? That crazy Osmet ruined things for me.) Dawn/Trachtenberg should have outgrown their wide-eyed ,whining ways by the time she was the oscillating age she was on Buffy, so I didn't really go in for it.

Wow, that was a long and completely off-topic rant. In any case, Trachtenberg doesn't do any of that here, so that's good, but she doesn't really do anything special either. And Licon looks like he's trying really hard to channel Wilson Cruz as Rickie Vasquez than anything else, but it never comes off as more than an impression.

Of course, none of these flaws seem to bother me all that much because I view each and every character as a sounding board for Neil and JGL's heart-wrenching and flawlessly executed performance.

I'm going to tell you something now because I care about you. Whenever I see a movie where a character, especially the protagonist, is a prostitute, I prepare myself for what I feel is the inevitable "bad john" scene. In this film it's particularly cruel and graphic, so I really felt I should be honest with you about that.

Because I couldn't sleep that night.

I suppose the real praise should go to Scott Heim for writing such a brutal novel on which to base this work. I understand that everything in it is based on people he knew and his experiences growing up in Hutchinson, Kansas.

Akari leaves you with lament, a feeling you can't seem to shake long after the particulars have faded from your memory. I'm in the same boat as Neil by the end, wondering how, and if it will ever, disappear. A