Mysterious Skin

*****

I’d kind of heard of Gregg Araki, but not in the way I could have said who he is or what he did. The name was familiar, but that was about all.

Then my daughter suggested we go to a movie. She checked the paper and thought Mysterious Skin sounded alright. It had good reviews and seemed to be about teenagers. So off we went.

If I’d been given a brief summary of the plot of Mysterious Skin I’d, quite frankly, never have gone, and it would have been my loss. It didn’t take long to realise two things very clearly. First, this is not the sort of film you usually take your daughter to and, second, it is absolutely brilliant.

It’s an odd one because while there is nothing particularly explicit in the movie, it is still extremely explicit. The script, direction, acting and photography come together in a powerful whole that takes you places you have never been before and probably had no desire to go to, until writer/director Araki took you.

Mysterious Skin is a coming of age story set largely in a small town. Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has been entrapped by a man he much admires, his baseball coach who is also a sexual predator. He uses Neil to bring other kids into his circle and to abuse them as well.

One of these is Brady Corbet (Brian Lackey). As teens Neil becomes a male prostitute, picking up men in and around his small town. He can walk into a bar and claim to have had sex with just about everyone there.

Brian, on the other hand, thinks he was abducted by aliens. He has no memory of his abuse at all, but knows that he has forgotten something. He goes on a quest to find out what happened to him and, eventually, finds his way to Neil.

For some reason Lou Reed’s love song Coney Island Baby keeps springing to mind when I think about this film:

And the straightest dude I ever knew
Was standing right for me, all the time
So I had to play football for the coach
And I wanted to play football for the coach
When you're all alone and lonely in your midnight hour
And you find that your soul, it has been up for sale

Neil’s life as a rent-boy provide powerful and sometimes moving glimpses into a different world, a world of truckers and travelling salespeople of rich and poor. Of people who are all in some way fundamentally alienated. A particularly powerful scene occurs between Neil and an older man with AIDs, his skin discoloured with dark spots, who just wants to be touched.

With almost any really good film I can usually still come out with some small criticism. It was too long, this scene was unnecessary, that character was a bit flat. Whatever. There was nothing of that in Mysterious Skin. Everything is there for a purpose. The conception and execution are exceptional.

If you are lucky a film will have a moment of transcendence. Mysterious Skin has two or three such moments that really move you, that really connect you with suffering humanity and also inspire you with the possibilities of human resilience and compassion.