Mysterious Skin

Dean and I went to see Mysterious Skin last night. It was directed by Gregg Araki and won the Golden Space Needle Award at the recent Seattle International Film Festival. What a lovely disturbing film this is! Joseph Gorden-Levitt (of Third Rock From the Sun fame) stars as a young man who was abused as an eight-year old by his Little League coach, and grows up to become a male hustler. His parallel character, who was also abused by the same coach, but suppresses it, becomes an asexual nerd, obsessed about dreams of being abducted by aliens. The final scene is a tour de force, where the two of them meet again, as 19 year-olds, and come to terms with their shared past. Some scenes of the movie are violent and difficult, but it is always graced with a sublime and honest sense of the absurd, and is definitely worth seeing.