Directed by Gregg Araki
Written by Gregg Araki
Starring:
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Neil McCormick
- Brady Corbet as Brian Lackey
- Michelle Trachtenberg as Wendy Peterson
- Jeffrey Licon as Eric Preston
- Mary Lynn Rajskub as Avalyn Friesen
- Elisabeth Shue as Mrs. McCormick
Release date: September 3, 2004
Rating: 
In Gregg Araki’s devastating and beautifully bruised film, truth takes the shape of a lament—a poem carved out of grief, drifting between the fractured inner worlds of two young men. One wanders through the half-light of broken memories; the other surrenders to a spiraling delirium forged in the fire of childhood pain, a torment that clings to them with eternal insistence. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) moves through life unarmored, trading intimacy for cash, while Brian (Brady Corbet), gentle and solitary, seeks refuge in the belief that he was once lifted away by something inhuman. Araki’s formal precision entwines Brian’s vaporous recollections with Neil’s scorching reminiscences, composing a mosaic of healing and hurt in which the boys stand apart in distance yet remain mysteriously aligned in spirit.
Throughout much of the film, the audiovisual landscape surrounding these characters unfolds in abrupt fragments, like a puzzle deliberately stripped of its central components. This fractured design astutely echoes the convoluted temporalities of memory, steering the narrative toward an interior space defined by the distortion of retrospection. The emotional impact is formidable, amounting to one of the most revealing and uncompromising cinematic treatises on child sexual abuse I have encountered. Its rawest episodes are undeniably discomforting, yet necessary for the integrity of its bleak thematic core, heightened by a somber dream pop undertow. Joseph Gordon-Levitt embodies anguish and existential dislocation with remarkable ferocity, while Brady Corbet — more muted in expression — nevertheless conveys the breadth of their shared desolation with disarming honesty. One might assume that, after such an unflinching depiction of innocence annihilated, the narrative might grant some form of cathartic absolution. But its devastating final movement provides no such Aristotelian cleansing. Instead, it articulates — with stark, almost clinical nihilism — a trauma beyond reconciliation, a conclusion that aligns far more with Nietzschean fatalism.
