Mysterious Skins is specifically about the fallout from the child molestation of its two protagonists, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian (Brady Corbet), but it's more generally about trauma and the inescapable lingering effects of trauma. The film is unflinching in its depiction of this trauma, in particular with Neil, whose experience is complicated further by his self-identified homosexuality -- which existed prior to the experience and grows into something more complex and troubling in the wake of the summer where he was sexually abused by his baseball coach (Bill Sage). Though Brian and Neil take very different paths towards coping with what they experienced, the film keeps coming back to how this one event has come to forever shape their lives and who they fundamentally are. While Brian's coping mechanism, blocking out the experience and substituting the fragments of it with a belief in alien abduction, is treated as though it's more light, even comical, the story recognizes how people deal with trauma in very different ways. Neil's story is more immediately compelling, in part due to a committed performance by Gordon-Levitt, but it's also related to how Neil writes the trauma into even the tiniest elements of his personality and behavior. This is most obviously seen in Neil's choice to become a male prostitute, in some ways reliving the experience through his work, first in his hometown in Missouri and later in New York City at the peak of the AIDS scare -- leading to a harrowing encounter with one client. The film eventually has the two young men come to terms with what they went through as children, with Brian seeking out Neil to understand what happened, but the film also acknowledges, as noted in the above quote from the film's touching and painful final scene, that they'll never be able to escape what happened to them.
Grade: ★★★
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