Out now in theaters is a gorgeous 4K restoration of Gregg Araki’s 2004 masterpiece Mysterious Skin.
Gregg Araki is one of the truly great queer maverick directors. Just check out his brilliant, transgressive, teen apocalypse trilogy: Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997). Each film is like having an incendiary device going off in your head. I remember seeing The Living End at a screening in 1992. It was such a hard time then during the AIDs holocaust, watching friends die daily. Trying to navigate through the rage and grief. And suddenly here was The Living End: about a young writer (Craig Gilmore), who in one day finds out he’s HIV-positive, picks up a trigger-happy, frighteningly cute, likewise-infected drifter (Mike Dytri) and ends up with him on the run from the law. Godardian in spirit it was very funny, but also defiant and angry and sexy too. It seemed a light in the darkness when I saw it.
But Mysterious Skin (2004) stands apart from the rest. Based on a harrowing, brilliant novel by Scott Heim, it’s set in Hutchinson, Kansas and concerns Brian (Brady Corbet) who, when he was 8 years-old, had five hours disappear from his life that left him with a bloody nose, bad dreams and an adolescence searching for clues.
Finally settling on alien abduction as the answer to the riddle of his amnesia, when he sees a photo of former little league teammate Neil (a sensational Joseph Gordon Levitt) he tries to track him down knowing he is the key to the puzzle. But Neil is now a male hustler in New York, haunted by the abuse he suffered as a child from his coach (an electrifying Bill Sage).
This was Araki’s most dazzling, mature work- about damaged boys and the havoc the past can wreak on their adult lives. Levitt is almost a ringer for Araki’s previous cinematic alter ego (James Duval) but he brings a lanky, sweet, seductive appeal that works as perfectly as the dreamy score by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie. A truly great film- upsetting at times, dark and sexy and smart- the end is as transcendent as it is mysterious.
