Review of Mysterious Skin (2005) by Adam B — 18 Jan 2012

Having seen only a few of Gregg Araki's films, I know that this guy isn't afraid of making odd movies about difficult subjects. This film is about the most normal film that he has made and it isn't about normal teenagers. The film features prolly my favorite and most couragous performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has since gone on to do more appealing films like(500) Days of Summer and Inception. This film, however, was made years before when Levitt was in what I like call his "indie phase". Most of the movies he made around this time, the early 2000s, were not really commercial films. In this film for instance he plays a gay male prostitute who was molested as a child by his baseball coach. The film follows him as he gets involved with developing his own little business. While all that happens there is another boy who suffers from blackouts and has dreams about UFOs. Now it doesn't take that long for us, the audience, to figure out that both of these boys were molested together by the same coach at the same time, but as for the characters it does take a while and that is what most of the film consists of, us watching the boy obsessed with UFOs trying to figure out what happened and him trying to find the Levitt character. At the end when they do meet, it is bittersweet and sad as Levitt's character explains rather explicitly what happened. this film isn't really an easy watch, but it is good and very interesting. As I said before it's one of my favorite Levitt films, if you like him from his other later films, I dare you to watch this and see just how good an actor he really is.

3/5, B.