Mysterious Skin, directed by Gregg Araki, is an intense, nearly X-rated coming-of-age gay story, based on the novel by Scott Heim. The film begins with two Little Leaguers in Hutchinson, Kansas. At the age of eight, Neil McCormick (played by Chase Ellison) is the best player on a baseball team, impressing the coach (played by Bill Sage) in more ways than he realizes. Chase's single mom (Elisabeth Shue) dates a lot of men and talks about her affairs, so he is streetwise, talks tough, and is open to anything exciting. Eight-year-old Brian Lackey (played by George Webster), the nerdy worst player on the team, disappoints his father (Chris Mulkey), who tells him that he does not measure up to the requirements of being a man, while his mother (played by Lisa Long) overprotects him; in time, he abandons Brian and his mother. The coach likes to cultivate his better players, and he takes special interest in Neil, including introducing him to some sexual activity. Using Neil as bait, the coach even manages to have three-way sex with both boys. However, the effects of sex differ as the eight-year-olds grow up. Neil becomes a teenage hustler (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), pleasing older men. Bored with small-town living, he decides to relocate to New York at the age of eighteen, moving into an apartment of his longtime Hutchinson girlfriend, Wendy (played by Michelle Trachtenberg), who precedes him by a few months. On the other hand, Brian (now played by Brady Corbet) blocks out all memory of the sexual experience; because of recurrent nosebleeds and nightmares, he at first believes that his memory loss is because an alien spaceship once abducted him. In his quest to fill in the gap in memory, a television program one day reveals that Avalyn (played by Mary Lynn Rajskub), a girl of his same age in a neighboring town, claims to have been the victim of alien abduction. Through research at the local library, eighteen-year-old Brian eventually intuits that his memory loss may somehow be associated with fellow Little Leaguer Neil. One day, however, Avalyn tries to pull down Brian's pants, and he backs away in horror. Meanwhile, Brian tracks down Neil's mother, who informs him that the object of his quest will be home for Christmas, so Brian patiently awaits the day when Neil may provide the key to his lost memory. Neil's sexual encounters are numerous enough throughout the movie that some straight filmviewers may have left the cinema before his final experience, shortly before leaving New York, in which a sadist picks him up and brutalizes him. His return to Hutchinson, thus, comes at a time when he can rethink his sexual proclivities, so he is not reluctant to tell Brian about the deep, dark sexual past. Indeed, they break into the coach's house to refamiliarize themselves with the place where they had their first sexual experiences; presumably because the coach is in prison, he is not present. Filmviewers leaving the film must guess which paths they will take next, so a sequel is possible. Although Mysterious Skin may appear to be nothing more than a realistic, clinical portrayal of traumatic first experiences, at least three profound questions are raised. First, how can sexual predators be stopped from ruining the lives of young people? Some straights believe that gays malevolently prey on the young to make them gay; insofar as Mysterious Skin feeds into that stereotypic conception, the film is a vicious indictment of a segment of gay life that some may wrongly assume is the entire picture. Secondly, the familiar question posed is whether sexual preferences are due to nature or nurture, and Mysterious Skin appears to imply, apart from sexual predator theory, that those with gay tendencies have absent or weak fathers and protective mothers. But thirdly, a question raised by the close relationships that both boys have with girls and women is why bisexuality is excluded as an alternative to the anguish of not conforming to the Americanistic norm of compulsory heterosexuality.  MH

I want to comment on this film

Mysterious Skin
by Scott Heim

At the age of eight Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he cannot remember an entire five-hour period of time.