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Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin ixnays the pederast apologia trend of L.I.E. and The Woodsman to do the decent thing brilliantly. It focuses instead on the victims of abuse, in this case two small-town Kansas boys who were seduced, fucked, and abandoned by their baseball coach (Bill Sage). Ten years later, one boy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) deals with his rape by becoming an emotionally cauterized hustler; the asexual other (Brady Corbet) blacks out the horror, believing instead that he was abducted by UFOs. The boys’ lives intertwine, leading to a single, unforgettably heart-wrecking closing image that doesn’t exclude a whiff of hope. Whatever you think of Araki’s past nihilist queer-splotation movies (The Doom Generation, Nowhere) is rendered moot by an entirely new, pensive, luminous realism supported by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd’s gauzy, gorgeous score. More than anything, Skin negates the pornography of false optimism. As in Scott Heim’s source novel, Araki’s indispensable movie poetically argues that memory scars everything; only a truthful engagement with the original wound does any good.

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