Mysterious Skin

Based on the novel by Scott Heim and adapted and directed by Gregg Araki, Mysterious Skin is a disturbed but touching story about child abuse and alien abduction. Yes, it sounds weird, and it is, but at the same time is completely real and these great characters are perfectly portrayed by gifted young actors.
We have two stories here, as Neil and Brian, two 8 year old small town Kansas kids play little league baseball, and after the game their lives are changed forever.

Neil goes to the Coach's (Bill Sage) house, a place with videogames, toys and individual boxes of cereal, everything a kid wants. The two of them play and have fun for days, until the coach professes his love for Neil and here's when his life changes. He's not really abused, because he likes it. He worships his coach, thinks of him as a father figure, and he knows how much he's loved by him. He's his superstar, and this continues for the whole summer.
Ten years later, Neil (wonderfully played by a very energetic Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a prostitute, and he's slept with every older men in town. He doesn't do it for the money, but because he likes it, because it's what his coach did to him and marked him forever. His friend Wendy (a very out of her normal but very good Michelle Trachtenberg) loves him, but she knows and understands Neil's life. They would probably get married and have children if he wasn't gay, she says.
She moves to New York, and after a while when Neil really gets bored of the town, Neil follows her there leaving his mom (Elizabeth Shue), who doesn't know about his life (I think) and his gay friend Eric, who's in love with him, back home.
While in New York, Neil continues his life, but the city is dangerous Wendy tells him, and he learns it the hard way.

Back to when they were kids, 8 year old Brian blacks out after the game, and wakes up in his cellar with a bloody nose. He doesn't remember what happened to him at all, but grows up dreaming about the Aliens that abducting him for those 5 blank hours. He also gets a bloody nose every now and then.
Ten years later, the grown up Brian (played very quietly but at the same time very strong by Brady Corbett) is a shy boy in search of an explanation. He's obsessed with aliens, making friends with Avalyn (Mary Lynn Rajskub) a young woman from a nearby town that appears on TV saying she was abducted by aliens. Avalyn gives Brian some answers, like the reason of his nose bleeds being that they inserted a tracking device in there. She also helps him with his dreams, as they dig up and find out that another kid named N. McCormick, who played with baseball with him appears in his dream too. And so Brian leaves Avalyn and goes on to find Neil but just when he left for New York. Brian makes best friends with Eric, who is fascinated by him as the two of them talk about Neil and the aliens.
Neil finally comes back home for Christmas, and it's a beautiful and deeply touching scene as the two young men unite after ten years for a trip down memory lane.

The movie's subject matter will probably scare some people, specially if you go see it not knowing what it is about. And while there are many sexual scenes, there's nothing explicit.
Gregg Araki has made Mysterious Skin a perfect movie about troubled teens as a result of a corrupted past, a childhood that in very different ways, scarred them forever.