Mysterious Skin

This makes a companion piece to Lilya 4-Ever, detailing child sexual abuse and prostitution from the boys’ side (much more harshly than the similarly themed L.I.E.) Gregg Araki’s adaptation of a Scott Heim novel is creepily convincing in showing a little league coach seducing one 8-year-old and raping another, and then picking up the story later, when one is a teenage hustler and the other is a befuddled dork who believes that blank in his memory means he was abducted by aliens. They follow their own damaging paths until they come together to tell their stories and achieve a fragile redemption. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is very good as the cocky boy fearlessly (and foolishly) selling his body, until he is brutalized in an exceptionally disturbing scene. Michelle Trachtenberg is his fag hag friend, but she will never, ever be as good as she was as Dawn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my favorite tv series of all time, for those ears I haven’t already bent with rants about the greatness of Joss Whedon’s collective masterpiece.) (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-74, RT-83.)