I’ve never been much of a fan of indie director Gregg Araki’s aggressive, in-your-face teen attitude-fests like the repellant Splendor and Nowhere. Araki has a knack for casting great looking young actors—The Doom Generation comes to mind—and setting them adrift in an esoteric soup of labored dialogue, flashy style and odd bi-sexual raunch. The one exception has been The Living End, a provocative early road picture about an unlikely, HIV-positive gay couple at the end of their respective ropes. Unlike most of his work, that film had an honest rawness and dose of real feeling. Beyond that picture, Araki has always seemed an eccentric, undeniably interesting filmmaker in search of a substantial script and dimensional characters. Most of the time his films feel like a big joke you’re just not in on.

Now comes Mysterious Skin, which is unquestionably Araki’s finest film yet, which may be attributed to its source material—an acclaimed novel by Scott Heim—and the first time he’s tried his hand at adaptation of something so rich.

Mysterious Skin nearly made me an Araki convert. It is the tale of two very different teenage boys who share a common past of sexual abuse, on two totally different life trajectories that converge powerfully by the story’s end. Araki has created a haunting film that, like its two opposing protagonists, dances around its deeper issues until they can no longer be denied.

Shot in an often-dreamy style that disarms its rough subject, Mysterious Skin tells the story of two rural Kansas boys circa 1980s, both molested by a charismatic baseball coach (Bill Sage). Neil, aware he’s gay by the young age of 8, falls madly in love with the coach in a relationship that will never be emotionally matched again. Raised by his promiscuous single mother (Elisabeth Shue), by his late teens he’s a cocky local hustler with a thing for older men and cheap tricks.

As played by Joseph-Gordon Levitt in a performance of utter conviction and both physical and emotional nakedness, Neil is the fascination of best friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg) and the secret love of punk-inspired Eric (Jeff Licon). Wendy leaves Kansas for Manhattan and soon after Neil follows, leaving Eric as a bridge to withdrawn Brian (Brady Corbet). Brian, another local boy, has blocked out his memory of the molestation with the belief he was abducted by aliens, a story that will lead him to damaged Neil and both of them to a final scene of immense depth. They share a flashback so frightening and poignant that it raises the film to a different level.

The less said about the film’s final scenes the better, except to say that a hush falls over the film, which up to its third reel is content to present itself as an oddly distanced tale of exhibition and repression borne by the same circumstance. Gordon-Levitt excels at the cocksure swagger of a gangly young man not quite into his own, yet using his body to extremes that somehow stay at arm’s length from his psyche. And Brady Corbet’s gawky young outcast, gradually unraveling pent-up memories is both funny and devastating when his repressed memories rise to the surface, which Araki poignantly sets on Christmas Eve in the most unlikely place.

Araki has never been one to shy away from explicit depictions of sexuality, and here he takes a fearless look into the grim encounters Neil faces, two of which are absolutely harrowing. But what’s really eye-opening is his clear-eyed look at a pedophiliac monster whose elaborate games of trust and seduction ensnare two adolescent boys—one of them shockingly enticing the other—into verbally and physically explicit scenes of erotic power and control.

They’re also heartbreaking in the hands of two gifted young actors who go with Araki right to the edge. It’s strong, risky stuff from a director who just took one giant leap.