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The story of Mysterious Skin follows two teenage boys living in small-town Kansas: Brian, a clunky and awkward fellow with no discernable social life; and Neil, a rebellious gay youth whose fragile beauty and cruel indifference make him a successful hustler to the area’s older men. Having suffered from blackouts as a child, Brian believes that these voids were actually alien abductions, and goes on a quest to confirm this. As his memories become increasingly vivid, Brian convinces himself that Neil, the star player on his childhood Little League team and a regular presence in his dreams, knows the truth. Neil does, in fact, know exactly what happened: the boys were sexually abused by their Little League coach. While Brian has suppressed the incident, Neil has held it deep within him like a treasure, considering it to have been a loving relationship of respect and tenderness, the absence of which has left him emotionally empty. The two strands of narrative are braided together elegantly, slowly leading up to a devastating final scene. Director Araki unifies the stories through an elegiac, celestial tone that manages to avoid preachiness via doses of appropriate humor.
The performances are extraordinary, pulsing with veracity and a bitter sweet naturalism, painful and profound. Savage in its depiction of Neil’s gay hustling encounters, graphic in its revelations of the inner pain inflicted on its characters and unflinching in its closing resolution, the film is a riveting original that some may find almost too agonising to experience. – Urban Cinefile
August 19th, 2008 at 21:29
getting ready to watch this in just a few. I love Gordon-Levitt…
Just got finished watching, amazing film. It rung out my emotions and made me feel raw. Imagery and acting made this entire movie excellent.
August 19th, 2008 at 21:40
Rimmer’s review from 18 months ago:
This is real quality, a true psycho-thriller, as two teenagers try to work through what happened to them as boys years before. The entire movie (with one exception - see below) is superbly scripted and acted, and the final scenes played out between the two main actors (the two teenage boys) are simply stunning. Watch this movie!
Two eight year old boys have sexual relations with their baseball coach. One blanks out the experience with an amnesia, and grows up convinced that for the missing five hours he had been abducted by aliens. The other happily remembers it all, and grows up as a gay hustler. Their two stories run in parallel through the movie until their paths finally coincide, back in the room where it all happened, and this final scene is absolutely stunning in its emotional intensity.
The failure in the film you can happily ignore, and that is the failure to capture any sense at all of the erotic relationship between the boys and the coach. The coach is hideously, sneeringly unattractive, and the relevant scenes are appallingly acted … but what do you expect. Ignore those few minutes (take them as necessary background material, badly presented) and the rest of the movie is awesome. Try the original book by Scott Heim if you want those scenes in quality images (in your head).
It’s a story (or two stories) to move you *and* to keep you pondering for days. And *that* is the mark of a good movie.
- Rimmer.
Alternative poster: http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/images/cinema/mysterious-skin.jpg
August 20th, 2008 at 00:15
Such a fantastic film, based on an equally amazing novel by Scott Heim. Heim is an excellent writer. Not long finished his most recent book - We Disappear - I really recommend it.
August 20th, 2008 at 00:31
Well Rimmer might think that Coach is unattractive, but to Neil it was love at first sight, he just had a thing for older men, look at the bald guy that he got head from at the softball field, his friend Eric couldn’t believe that he was attracted to him. Both the book and movie are great, especially the ample shots of Joey’s cute bare butt.
One thing that I’ve wondered about though is if Brian and Eric remained friends after Brian finally met Neil and found out the truth.
August 20th, 2008 at 01:06
I must say that this is one of the best movies I have experienced. It was truly difficult to watch some scenes (rape scene in particular), but the final shot with them and Sigur Ros playing in the background was such a rewarding ending– it really blew me away. Its the type of moving that isn’t so much entertainment as it is affecting– if that makes any sense.
Ebert kind of compared “Wild Tigers I have known” to this- because its another movie about audience experience and tone more so than plot, but Mysterious Skin is such a masterpiece on its own that I really cant even put it in the same league as “Wild Tigers”. Tigers had some of the worst acting Ive ever seen- and Mysterious Skin is a masterclass. And of course Joseph Gordon Levitt is totally hot!
August 20th, 2008 at 03:49
Greate acting , Mesmerizing photography , Brutaly honest . A MASTER PIECE .
August 20th, 2008 at 04:49
I love this movie. I cry every time watching this. Great acting and great but sad story line. This is one of many of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s great movies. I love his acting. I so wish he would become a larger star.
August 20th, 2008 at 05:33
Awesome film, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was perfect.
August 20th, 2008 at 06:24
I will watch the movie. I will read the book.
The problem I have with the premise I am hearing described is why the boy who fell in love with his coach didn’t go on via his hustling to make it academically in something like economics and come up with answers that assist, support and make life better for follow-on boys and men.
We who were loved by older men have much to offer.
I bet the storytelling in both the movie and book are fantastic: Looking Forward!
Lukas
August 20th, 2008 at 07:03
This is one of those movies that I saw on a rented DVD and bought immediately afterwards. Even the noted scene or two with the coach being sub-par does evoke some of the imagery that is intended. I have yet to read Heim’s book, but this has rekindled my wish to do so.
Yeah, the movie was very well acted, masterfully crafted, and excellently shot.
Another good movie by Levitt is Brick, a somewhat obtuse movie and yet another odd part for him that he did well in. Been in love with that boy since 3rd Rock, lol.
Anyway, thanks Josh for bringing this movie up, it was quite good.
Another well-acted one is Running With Scissors. Bit odd, but the acting is great.
And yet another classic, not often seen or reviewed, is For A Soldier Lost. Dutch (I think), extremely well screen-played, acted and directed, with many memorable scenes.
Anyway, sorry to rattle on…
August 20th, 2008 at 23:57
Lukas-he just wasn’t interested in much besides sex, drugs and drinking, up untill the last sex scene, he led a kind of blessed life where everything went his way and turned out good
August 21st, 2008 at 02:26
Seems to be a good example for double-faced attitude, like “boys can find men sexy” on the one hand, but “it’s of course always abuse” on the other. If the director had not presented the latter idea then he would have not gotten away with this movie, he would be a total outcast now. Besides that, it also shows the fascination of some directors for filming the rape of males (I guess the rape of a females is just too “conventional”).
August 21st, 2008 at 09:43
Kevin mentions the movie FOR A LOST SOLDIER.
It deserves a Milkboys review at some stage.
In the mean time, here’s mine from eighteen months ago.
This is a movie you really should see. It is superbly scripted, superbly acted, superbly filmed - and it is a story to warm your heart. Best of all, it’s a true story.
This is the story of a relationship between a man and a boy: a soldier and an evacuee near the end of the 1939-45 war during the liberation of the Netherlands.
And this is the account of that relationship, as written not by the man, but by the boy.
He remembers it as a wonderful, magical time: his first true love. When the soldier moves on with his comrades, the boy Jeroen goes searching for him, in despair at the loss of his lover. When he writes up the story years later as autobiography, he dedicates it to the love he has lost: he writes it “For a Lost Soldier”.
And perhaps *because* it is a true story, *told by* the loved boy, this is the only movie I know that presents the love between a man and a boy as genuinely tender and beautiful. You have to see it. The sex scene, when it comes, does not seem out of place at all: it is the natural progression of their love for each other. You do not see the penetration: you see Jeroen wait for the moment, and bite the pillow, and sigh, as the two of them achieve the bonding they both seek.
Beautifully filmed from beginning to end, a relationship to warm the heart, a ‘must see’ movie.
http://www.videokids.ru/img/film/full/88.jpg
- Rimmer.
August 21st, 2008 at 09:49
Fulcher’s right, of course, about the ambiguous nature of the subtext of Mysterious Skin. Watch ‘For a Lost Soldier’ as an antidote, and for an amazing film from mainstream Hollywood, try THE WOODSMAN. Here’s my old review.
This is an amazing movie: a mainstream movie with a mainstream actor playing a mainstream paedophile.
Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a girl-focussed paedophile just released from four years in prison. He attempts to begin a new life: apartment, job (at a lumbar yard), no history.
The film presents an amazing portrait of this individual struggling with his own ghosts, with the prejudices of the people around him, and with the tormenting phenomenon which is compulsory therapy - juggling with the inevitable tension that anything he says in therapy might one day be used in evidence against him.
The film is astonishingly brave. We see him pursuing girls - through the mall, on the street, on the bus: the whole experience from his perspective. We see his mixed emotions as he observes himself falling back into this pattern. We see him groom one girl across a number of occasions. We see her offer herself to him. We see his response. We see him act out some of his demons - in sex, in a fist fight. Along the way he encounters two victims of incest (both of whom find that he is the first person they have ever been able to tell), countless self-righteous bullies, and at least two people who are willing to give him a chance.
His apartment is opposite a grade school. He watches the children arrive and leave. He only goes down there himself when the place is deserted, facing his own demons and his own emptiness.
From his window he observes a boy-focussed paedophile in action, day by day, outside the school gates, wooing and grooming.
I shalln’t give away give away any more of the plot, because you ought to see this movie.
The portrayal is hanting, for someone who shares some of the same demons, some of the same fears, and here sees them so skilfully portrayed for everyone to see.
He just wants “normal”. And what is normal? asks his therapist. To paraphrase his answer, normal is when you can be around children and feel OK.
The two paedophiles do eventually interact. You can approve of Walter’s actions at that point, or you can disapprove of them. But more fascinating is that you are left wondering whether Walter’s actions are about the other guy, or about himself.
You can approve of disapprove of the ending as well, if you wish. It is designed to make the film just about bearable for a mainstream audience. It doesn’t detract from the awesome power of this film.
It’s on Amazon. Click, click, click.
http://www.lovefilm.com/lovefilm/images/products/9/37879-large.jpg
- R.
August 22nd, 2008 at 16:17
I saw this at the Quad in Greenwich Village, NYC. After the film a boy (20ish) a couple rows ahead of me had clearly broken down crying. After he recovered somewhat he hurriedly left the theater. My curiosity piqued, I followed. When I got outside I could see him running pellmell down the block. Clearly something in the film had gotten to him. I followed for awhile to see if he would recover alright, and he appeared to calm down after awhile, but I got a good run out of it. :)
August 26th, 2008 at 02:38
Yey, chris: I think I might have run long and hard after him too - I assume he was HOT…
August 26th, 2008 at 02:45
Well, what I really came to write was my shock at Rimmer recycling 18-month-old material here. I’m also a bit shocked at how willing he was to buy into this piece of anti-paedo propaganda. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is positively mouthwatering, it is hard to do anything but drool at the thought of being connected in some practical way with his smooth gorgeousness, and the film has plenty of food for thought here: as hinted at by the reviewer from Urban Cinefile, it’s pulsing with veracity and a bitter sweet naturalism which make the nekkid scenes far more erotic than a mere porno movie.
No, of course, the fundamental problem is its complete bungling of what sex is all about. It’s not that I would expect any better of what is, after all, a relatively mainstream movie - it even got as far as my local video library, which is saying something. No, my disappointment is that somebody I respect as much as Rimmer should be so pleased with it. He criticizes only that the scenes of abuse are unerotic, and the coach ugly, but surely the rot is far deeper than that.
Received opinion on the mysterious attraction between males is that it’s grossly unnatural, and that the taste for it is one passed on, like some disease, from one generation to the next. ‘Normal’ gay men, of the sort that get married and have a pet poodle, may nowadays claim that their condition is a genetic one, but devotees of intergenerational sex are still expected make do with being victims of abuse, sorry on that one.
Certainly the coach, the abuser, is portrayed as an ogre, a ‘groomer’, the very worst kind of exploiter - in particular note how he uses young Neil not only as a sex toy, but also as a sidekick helping him to seduce other boys: every mother’s worst nightmare. No wonder Neil’s life was screwed if he imagined that this poisonous charade had anything to do with love and affection.
Paul here celebrates the fact that Neil is attracted to older men, specifically preferring to have sex with them, and turning this preference to commercial advantage in his hustling activities. There are boys, and young men, who are turned on by baldness and by pot-bellies: they are, however, relatively few and far between, and most of us would consider them to be slightly strange: Neil is not like us, and we would not expect, or imagine, or hope, our children to be like him. We might fantasize about meeting him at a swimming pool, we might have a friend who met a boy like that once, there may even be one or two of us who were such a boy, but he is generally something out-of-the-ordinary, he is Different From Us: not even born weird, he was traumatized into it by being made to fist-fuck the person he most respected in the world, and who wouldn’t be?
Why am I carping like this? Because sex isn’t out-of-the-ordinary, and it happens to people just like us, to people just like everybody else. For boys approaching, reaching, just past puberty, for much of their waking and sleeping lives, they are ruled by a titanic force located in their underpants. This will often overrule anything and everything their brain, parents, friends, school tells them, and take them on a scary and thrilling roller-coaster ride, inducing them to do all sorts of things that they might have difficulty explaining in a court of law, or even to themselves. Sex with available girls, boys, women, men, animals, trees, anything that comes to hand. Past 16, the force subsides, though for many men the roller-coaster continues, sometimes openly, but usually secretly, but for most men, the memory fades, just as so many memories of childhood fade, to be replaced by denial. In this respect, Brian, the ugly one, the boy who forgot his boyhood sexual encounters, represents normality: most middle-aged men will have completely forgotten circle jerks and all the other ’stuff’ they did as boys, won’t they? Certainly, any suggestion that they’d had sex with a man and enjoyed it would seem just as outrageous as claiming they’d been abducted by aliens, wouldn’t it?
August 27th, 2008 at 09:29
I love this movie, First found it when Milkboys advertised for another movie, and I saw a preview of it with the youtube video for something else.
August 27th, 2008 at 14:58
BoyMagnet- I suppose I am misreading your opinion- you say that Neil is “generally something out-of-the-ordinary”. Thus, the situation with Neil, the coach, and Brian is certainly out of the ordinary. That’s the point– its not that sex is out of the ordinary– its that this situation is out of the ordinary, and the effects that it has on the characters is completely different. Your last two sentences sums it up nicely, and I think that this development and the general unfolding of the story makes it for a completely entertaining and affecting film.
So I don’t know that I understand your criticism or maybe its that we are using different yard sticks by which to compare films. Certainly you are entitled to your opinion, but I certainly don’t think the fact that it got a relatively wide release is relevant to the film at all. The film was made with limited independent funding; it did well in the festival circuit, and was picked up for decent distribution. This all happened much after the movie was completed, and certainly I don’t think the director was planning for such a distribution given the subject matter. I don’t mean to emphasize this, because I do the same thing subconsciously.
August 27th, 2008 at 15:56
Steve - thanks for clarifying the matter of distribution: it would seem that the film got widely distributed because it appealed to relatively mainstream audiences, rather than the reverse. I wouldn’t deny that it’s a likable film: not a dry Kleenex in the house.
I don’t have a problem with films portraying unusual situations - let’s face it, a film about a typical working day in my life would not be worth going to see. But then, very few films are made about intergenerational sex at all - even to tell lies about it is bad karma. Of the few that are made, only a small minority show any sensitivity or empathy at all with man or boy - the only one most people seem to be able to think of is For a Lost Soldier, though obviously there are others. In general, public morals demand the reinforcement of stereotypes, and clear, black-and-white portrayals of demonic offenders and hapless victims, which is pretty much what Mysterious Skin delivers, albeit in a very sophisticated way.
The coach is a cartoon ogre: it would be interesting to know from real life police records how many paedophiles have ever been convicted, or even accused, of getting a boy to fist-fuck them. Those of us who weep for Neil in his lifelong loneliness will, like him, curse the truly despicable coach for exploiting it, and/or for making him that way. Sports coaches, and others who might wish to pull back their own curtain of amnesia, should welcome this film as much as turkeys should welcome Christmas.
October 17th, 2008 at 03:02
For a zero star movie I fail to understand all the reactions. It was a B A D movie and uninteresting and given the plethora of gay movies it is not even worhty of any [further] note.