Parents' Guide to Mysterious Skin

Compassion becomes the method in this haunting portrait of two boys who survived abuse from the same man. Mysterious Skin borrows freely from David Lynch. Director Gregg Araki sets it in a stylized Kansas outside ordinary time, lets the young men these boys became narrate their own flashbacks, and pushes the surreal up against small-town rooms, conjuring the dream logic of Mulholland Drive to tell a story no other film about abuse has told this way. Araki and cinematographer Steve Gainer hold the camera on the children's faces without a trace of morbidity. They grant these boys the tenderness their abuser withheld. After The Doom Generation and the rest of his nihilistic run, Araki reveals the heart that always sat inside the provocation.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives the performance of his career as Neil. His rawness, and the cold-heartedness others perceive in him, suggest a modern James Dean. Brady Corbet plays Brian in near silence and says an enormous amount with his eyes. Michelle Trachtenberg knows exactly what loving Neil costs a friend and plays both sides of it. Bill Sage takes the trickiest assignment and stays human while doing something monstrous, never letting the coach curdle into a creep, which frightens far more. Araki offers no easy answers about recovery. He builds toward a bond between these two, and a final scene of real delicacy. Twenty years later, the film has aged beautifully, and anyone mature enough to sit with it will find an essential work from that decade.