GREGG Araki, a bad-boy founder of New Queer Cinema back in the ’90s, makes a terrific return to form with “Mysterious Skin,” his most mature, hauntingly poetic and disturbing film to date.
Working for the first time from someone else’s story (a novel by Scott Heim), Araki burrows deeply into the psyches of two 20-ish men whose lives were touched in very different ways by close encounters with a pedophile baseball coach (Bill Sage) a decade earlier.
Neil – brilliantly played by a newly buff Joseph Gordon Levitt, who will henceforth no longer be referred to as the kid from TV’s “3rd Rock From the Sun” – is a reckless gay hustler in his hometown of Hutchinson, Kan., with “a hole where his heart should be,” according to his best friend, Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg).
Former teammate Brian (the excellent Brady Corbett) long ago left Hutchinson, but is still haunted by blackouts, nosebleeds and his inability to recall a ninehour stretch after a game.
Brian theorizes – hopes? – he might have been abducted by aliens, but the apparently asexual Brian pushes away the advances of a handicapped fellow UFO fancier (Mary Lynn Rajskub) even as she pushes him back to Hutchinson to face his demons.
By this point, Neil has taken his rough-trade business to New York, where he has some harrowing encounters with older men (the setting is the early 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic), including a brutal bathtub rape in Brighton Beach that’s almost impossible to watch.
When a shaken Neil comes home to Kansas for Christmas, he takes Brian to the coach’s old home, where he shares memories in a sequence that’s as poignant as it is horrifying.
“Mysterious Skin” is not for the squeamish, but it is a beautifully crafted and thoughtful film that genuinely provokes.
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MYSTERIOUS SKIN
[*** 1/2] (Three and one-half stars)
Close encounters of the felonious kind. Running time: 99 minutes. Not rated (rape, violence, sex, nudity, profanity). At Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue.