There's a tactile quality to Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin. The images are so luxuriously textured that you want to touch them. It's a bold aesthetic choice for a film about suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, but it's clear that Araki's sumptuous imagery (literally candy-coloured in the striking first shot) is meant to suggest the halcyon perceptions of youth rather than an objective point of view.

The film is adapted from a novel by Scott Heim, from which it also borrows its dual-narrator structure. The two protagonists, Neil (played as a child by Chase Ellison and a teenager by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian (George Webster and Brady Corbet) are victimized by their little league coach (Bill Sage), but only Neil consciously realizes it, while Brian constructs an amusing alien-abduction fantasy.

Araki resists playing Brian's search for the extra-terrestrial truth for easy laughs, but it's clear his heart is in the other storyline. Neil's evolution from confused victim to strutting small-town hustler is evinced beautifully by Gordon-Levitt's performance, which runs the gamut from golden-god arrogance to alarming vulnerability. Although Mysterious Skin is set in a Midwest backwater, it bypasses the usual redneck-baiting. Neil longs to escape from his dead-end environs, but Araki lets us see that his flight impulse is internally and not externally motivated.

Neil and Brian spend most of the film apart, but when the script brings them together for the inevitable moment of catharsis, it works. After this uncommonly affecting drama, Araki's reputation as a stylishly glib indie provocateur may be in jeopardy: Mysterious Skin is visually arresting, but beneath the shimmering surface, its concerns are palpably humane.

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