Beauty in the beast

Mysterious Skin starts with a lyrical scene in which a preteen boy, Neil, is seduced by his Little League baseball coach amid a shower of multi-coloured breakfast cereals; it then follows him (now played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of 3rd Rock From the Sun) into his teens as he embarks on an amoral, risk-taking career as a rent boy.

In parallel, the film explores the life of fellow Little Leaguer Brian (Brady Corbett), who is also molested by the coach but suppresses the memory and comes to believe that he must have been abducted by aliens. Their final scene together gives the film an ending so tender and transcendent it almost suggests hope.

It's a strange but - subject-matter notwithstanding - far from sensational film. It is a rigorously-paced, studiedlybeautiful piece of work, like most of the earlier films from its director, the Californian Gregg Araki, avatar of the "Queer New Wave" (a label he now rejects). Which is not to say that what the coach does is beautiful or harmless: just that there are other fictional ways of handling such sordid truths than gritty neo-realism.

"It's the first time I've ever done such a sincere, emotional, character-driven drama," says Araki. "With my films in the past, there's always been a kind of satirical post-modern edge to them. This is a huge departure for me, but it's also like my other films - thematically, in visual style and with the music."

Ah, the music. The score for Mysterious Skin - by Californian ambient pioneer Harold Budd and former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, who play together in a concert at the Brighton Festival later this month - is reason enough to see the film: resonant and intense, emotional and distant at the same time. Like the movie, in fact, which is sure to be controversial but also liable to reach a wider audience than such earlier Araki films as The Doom Generation and Totally F***ed Up.

Mysterious Skin is adapted from an astonishing first novel from 1995 by Scott Heim who, like his characters, grew up in rural Kansas. Now based in Boston, Heim elegantly dodges the question about the extent to which the story - told in the book in two first-person narratives - is autobiographical. "It's so far from reality now that I forget what parts are sort of true and which are exaggerated or revised," he says. "There's a lot of stuff in there that did happen to me, but it's fractured through so many different characters.

"I took all the things from my childhood that were sort of safe and about living on a farm with a more typical family, and put those into the Brian character. And then, at some point in my life, my parents became divorced and my mother became an alcoholic and I went kind of crazy. All that experience I put into Neil."

The result is a novel that, as one American reviewer put it, is " breathtakingly unafraid to take chances".

So is the film. The possibility of a movie version surfaced almost immediately after publication. Heim had developed a screenplay of his own (with the help of, among others, the octogenarian Stewart Stern, who wrote Rebel Without a Cause) by the time Araki called. In the end, Araki wrote his own screenplay - which, interestingly, proved to be much closer to the novel than Heim's.

Heim admits that he had some initial reservations. "I admired Gregg's films for things like colour and movement and action and music," says the novelist. "But they were never character studies." Conversations with the actors helped reassure him, however. "Brady and Joe would call me after a day's shooting and tell me how things were going," he says, "and somewhere in there I realised that all my concerns were going to be soothed.