GREGG ARAKI is a punky 45-year-old American director who comes to London trailing the most controversial film of his colourful career. Mysterious Skin, based on a book by Scott Heim, is a rites-of-passage story about two Kansas boys, Neil and Brian, who are shockingly abused by their Little League baseball coach at the age of eight. There is an echo of the Pitcairn Island scandal about the film that is impossible to ignore.

Neil thinks his relationship with coach is the most exciting, natural, and glamorous thing that’s ever happened to him. Brian thinks he’s been abducted by aliens. The unnerving feature is the psychological disparity between the children’s points of view. The surprise is how sensitively their stories are filmed.

Araki is not Hollywood’s most famous exponent of good taste. The best part of his working life has been spent shooting homoerotic (often unrated) fantasies full of cartoon violence and teen anguish. He once likened his early films to Smiths songs — long on irony and desperately self-conscious. Totally F***** Up (1993) celebrated the thankless lot of alienated young gays in LA. The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) completed a trilogy starring disaffected youths whose Morrissey days start badly and then get worse.

Typically, Araki’s modest faith in his own genius has hardly been dented by the unsportsmanlike maulings some of his films have received. Yet even he has been taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive reception for Mysterious Skin. “When I started writing the script I was convinced it would be unrated, like Larry Clark’s Kids,” says Araki. “But curiously, the film is not as shocking as I thought it would be. The reason is that it is so beautiful and dreamlike it sort of sucks you beyond the controversy.

“There’s a lot of hard and disturbing material, but you’re so involved with the characters and their journey that you go with it.” Araki makes it sound like a glorious accident, but the undeniable quality and depth of his film owes an awful lot to Scott Heim’s novel and the script he hammered out with the director. It’s the first time Araki has adapted a book for screen and if the results are as affecting as this, it shouldn’t be his last. “I cried when I read the novel,” Araki admits. “I mean who the hell cries when they’re reading a book?”

This is obviously a baffling question for a film graduate who has spent the most formative years of his education wrestling with comic books and Hitchcock. What gripped Araki was the painful biographical truth. Heim clearly lived much of his novel. “How much? I don’t know. Something did happen between Scott and his Little League coach,” says Araki. “I asked him before we started filming which character he identified with most. He said all three: Brian, Neil, and the coach.

“The coach is hardly in the movie after the first reel but he haunts every single frame. The film really puts you in the place of the kids, their attempts to cope, and how it informs their entire lives.”

The result is a curious and ambivalent blend of dark and light. Neil (Joseph Gorden-Levitt) grows up to be a gay heart-throb and careless hustler. Brian (Brady Corbet) becomes a reclusive loner, haunted by nosebleeds and dreams of alien abduction. Only when their stories finally merge do you get a sense of the collective, long-distance damage.

For Araki, the film plucks topical chords about our “dark and dangerous world”, the Russian horrors of Beslan and the events of 9/11. He perhaps credits his film with more topicality than it can possibly bear. “Our sense of uncertainty and vulnerability is probably more prevalent today than it was in 1995 when the novel was written,” he says. “The fact that bad things can happen to you at any moment resonates much more in the film than the book.”

The point sounds solid enough, but this is a Gregg Araki movie and one feels honour-bound to misinterpret at least half of it. The provocative bone of contention is Araki’s portrayal of Neil, the precocious hero who not only seems to tolerate the coach’s paedophile attentions, but actively revels in their relationship. He is smitten with the coach before he hits his first home run. Pictures of Mark Spitz and other 1970s male icons flit through his dizzy head.

The kitchen cupboard stuffed with goodies and the trips to the pizza parlour are frequently fondled memories. Indeed Neil’s teen and young adult selves spend the rest of the film trying to fill the aching gap left by the dashing, mustachioed knight. The self-denial is so powerful that it’s like a drug.

In short, Neil is not the tabloid image of an abused child, and the coach “is not this weird evil man who pitches up in a van out of nowhere. He’s your next-door neighbour,” Araki says. “The most normal guy in the world.” “It’s in the story that Neil is gay at an early age and attracted to the coach,” admits Araki. “But I feel he is the most damaged individual in the film. Yes there are things in the movie that open your eyes. That shed a light on something so taboo that people don’t want to talk about it. But if people don’t want to acknowledge uncomfortable truths then abuse will always happen.

“I’m not setting out with an agenda saying this is wrong. It happens. I think it’s terrible. But I’m an artist, not a politician. And I think my work is frequently misinterpreted because I have a hard time squaring my films (which are very personal) with how they are interpreted.”

Mysterious Skin screens at the festival on Oct 25 & 26

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette