Mysterious Skin is a 2004 drama film directed by American filmmaker Gregg Araki, who also wrote the screenplay based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Scott Heim. The film is Araki's eighth, premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2004, although it was not more widely distributed until 2005.
Mysterious Skin tells the story of two pre-adolescent boys who are sexually abused by their baseball coach, and how it affects their lives in different ways into their young adulthood. One boy becomes a reckless, sexually adventurous male prostitute, while the other retreats into a fantasy of alien abduction.
Born in 1972 in Kansas, 8-year-old Neil McCormick (Chase Ellison as a boy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an adolescent) and Brian Lackey (George Webster and Brady Corbet) are sexually abused by their baseball coach (Bill Sage). Both boys are targets for abuse due to their dysfunctional families: Neil's single mother (Elizabeth Shue) is neglectful and preoccupied with a string of boyfriends, while Brian's parents are on the verge of divorce.
Neil showed signs of being homosexual at an early age -- he was fascinated with male models depicted in his mother's Playgirl magazines. He interprets
(This is information generated from a Wikipedia article, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.)