Mysterious Skin

With Mysterious Skin, iconoclastic nineties filmmaker Gregg Araki left behind the wild energy of his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy and made something altogether more tender, adapting Scott Heim's novel into one of the great coming-of-age films. The kind of film that's hard to look at, but even harder to turn away from.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has never been as thrillingly alive as he is here as Neil, one of two young men haunted by childhood abuse at the hands of their baseball coach. While Neil drifts through a dangerous life on the edges of small-town Kansas, his fellow survivor Brian (Brady Corbet, years before The Brutalist) has retreated inward, convinced he was abducted by aliens as a kid. Remembrances of their shared past slowly pulls them back together.

Beautifully supported by Jeff Licon, Elisabeth Shue and a luminous Michelle Trachtenberg, in what is surely the most significant performance of a tragically short career, Mysterious Skin is Araki at his most empathetic and heartbreaking. Not just a high point in his body of work, but a transcendence.