The story is set partly in a small town north of Wichita, but, in toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more once we descend into "Mysterious Skin," a powerful, pitiless, wildly lurid tale of pedophilia on the plains.

		'Mysterious Skin' Rating: Close to an NC-17 in nature for highly graphic sexual content, images and themes. Starring: Brady Corbet, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bill Sage, Elisabeth Shue. Director: Gregg Araki.

Eight-year-olds Neil and Brian are the yin and yang of their Little League team -- clutch hitter and strikeout king, respectively -- with nothing in common except bad parenting and too much unsupervised time at night. But their friendly coach (Bill Sage) is a charismatic surrogate and very fond of them.

Too fond. His house is -- well, a Neverland of fun, food and freedom, where it rains Fruit Loops and the video games never stop, except now and then for darker games with a different kind of coaching.

Cut to four, then eight years later. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a budding gay hustler with a hole in his heart and a plan to hit New York City. Brian (Brady Corbet), who has blackouts and nosebleeds, is staying behind with his UFO obsession and his nightmares. There are mostly caricatures and precious few real people in these boys' separate worlds -- and the same is true for director Gregg Araki's screenplay, based on a novel by Scott Heim. Only Neil's childhood soulmate (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Brian's mascara-laden best friend (Jeff Licon) matter to them, or us.

What starts to matter more to Neil is that each of his customers -- and the resulting sexual encounter -- gets more psychically perverse and physically dangerous than the one before. The last of them is one of the most disturbing, graphically violent rape scenes I've ever seen on film, with dialogue to match. It was made with "good" (i.e., realistic) intentions, it contains minimal nudity, and it is not prurient. But no one under 21 should be allowed to see it. It is very rough going.

Kansas is a California backlot, not the real thing, but the photography and recurring images -- cereal floating down around Neil, tossed by the cereal killer of his innocence -- are stunning. Above all, it is agonizingly well acted by Corbet and Gordon-Levitt (despite the latter's mumbling).

The sociology of the narrative is pretty predictable -- no breakthroughs. The usual parental suspects are rounded up and indicted from the get-go for their habitual absentee, alcoholic, over- or under-protective failings. There's no interest in the pathology of the pedophilic coach.

I wonder how much better off we are here (and in general) with our consciousness raised on this subject. You get over the outrage and quickly inured to it, as with every other newly unveiled horror. On the right, you get Rick Santorum's moral-political manipulation ("It's all liberal Boston's fault"). On the left, you get Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" jokes (Q: "What are they gonna do to Michael Jackson if they catch him with another boy?" A: "Give him his own parish.").

Neither response does the victims any good, but I don't know if the traumatic film at hand does, either. Brian's and Neil's ruined lives? The best they can shoot for is catharsis. Recovery? Impossible. The pessimism beneath this "Mysterious Skin" is close to despair, and the worst thing about it is that it may well be justified.