Childhood's dead end

Reviewed - Mysterious Skin: Though based on a novel by Scott Heim, the latest creepy dispatch from the professional pessimist Gregg Araki, director of the notorious The Living End, feels a little like a decent idea for a short film stretched to uncomfortable length.

There is a fascinating conceit at the picture's heart - parallels are drawn between the traumatising effect of childhood sexual abuse and the alleged memory annihilation that proverbially follows alien abduction - but Mysterious Skin, much praised on its US release, spends too much time tramping over the same ground. Still, in a week where a certain cinematic fatty has elbowed every other mainstream release out of the bed, Mysterious Skin offers a stimulating blast of raw, jolting energy.

Two boys, residents of a dull Kansas town, react very differently to their molestation by the local sports coach. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) - who, the film clumsily makes clear, was aware of being gay before the incident - grows up into a troubled sexual hustler with, as his best friend melodramatically puts it, "a bottomless black hole" at his heart. Brian (Brady Corbet), less confident than Neil, more of a loner, suppresses the memory and replaces the lost time with imaginings about probing aliens.

Later in life Neil heads for New York, where he is beaten and abused, while Neil stays at home and makes friends with an awkward girl (the smashing Mary Lynn Rajskub from The Larry Sanders Show, 24 and a million other things) who shares his interest in all things extra-terrestrial.

A powerful, troubling scene in which the coach initiates the first abusive relationship features a terrifically oily performance from Bill Sage as the predator and a convincingly numb one from Chase Ellison as the young Neil. It is clear from the editing that Ellison would not have heard or seen anything inappropriate, but the sequence establishes a poisonous atmosphere that hangs over the rest of the picture.

Sadly, Gordon-Levitt, who readers may remember from Third Rock From the Sun, rather deflates the enterprise when he takes over. Looking a little like a cut-price Keanu Reeves, Gordon-Levitt, all shuffles and sniffles, has the habit of biting off the end of his sentences. This and the picture's unrelenting grimness does eventually become a little wearying. Worthwhile, for all that.