ANYONE WHO HAS ever been a fan of a Gregg Araki film can give thanks to the gods of culture that he can't carry a tune or play an instrument. "My biggest regret is that I was never in a band," he admits. But the films are a fine compensation.

Chatting with him the day after he received a Frameline Award and a week before the local release of Mysterious Skin, I get a lesson in the Araki concept of life as a soundtrack. "I think I was born at the perfect time," says Araki, who came into the world Dec. 17, 1959. "We got to experience all the great music events at the actual time they happened. I was 16 when the Sex Pistols were hitting in America and punk-rock culture took over: the whole DIY status of it, anticorporate, march to your own drummer, who cares what people think of you, that was such a powerful influence on me. Punk rock, new wave, and the whole world of alternative music was creatively so exciting." Araki says The Doom Generation is his Nine Inch Nails film, and "a lot of [the others] are the Jesus and Mary Chain, in the sense that there's a kind of naive romanticism at their heart, surrounded by chaos."

Araki was the bad boy of the New Queer Cinema, the one willing to send his characters in The Living End (my favorite of his early films) on an HIV positive spree across the American badlands, the black-leather-jacket guy in the corner offering a taunt in place of an invitation. One year at Sundance, everyone was whispering about his new behavior. I remember John Waters's version the best: "It's so boring now that everyone is coming out. It's so great that Gregg is going back in." Araki says with a laugh, "Yeah, that was the year I tried dating girls." He's matter-of-fact about it now. How exactly does he define his sexuality these days? "I'm a person," he says calmly. "I have a boyfriend, but I'm a person." In a corner of the room, the patient boyfriend Web surfs, calling out, "Ed Koch [formerly the mayor of New York City] just gave your film a positive review!" Araki claims an affinity with today's younger generation, and says that Mysterious Skin actors Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt "have this 'who cares' attitude about their sexuality. I think that's so modern and healthy. It's not like being in the closet or hiding, or being on the down low. It's just that it doesn't matter. There's such an open-mindedness among kids their age."

It's hard to connect this well-mannered, reasonable guy to the wild-man films he's created. Araki understands: "People always think, because of my movies, I come from some family of drug addicts ... but I have this unnaturally normal childhood, this perfect suburban life. It's shocking how normal it is." He didn't even grow up in Los Angeles (where his films, until Mysterious Skin, have always been set) but in Santa Barbara, where he remained to go to college at UC Santa Barbara, even living with his family. "You have to have a supernormal background to be able to take the plunge." So while he gives his damaged characters in Mysterious Skin his favorite childhood cereal boxes and has them eat Spaghetti-Os like he did, the story of parental indifference and serious emotional harm is, yes, fiction.

Araki knows about cinematic fiction, what with a degree in film studies from UCSB, where he was schooled by auteurists. "I'm super old-school." He reels off Sarris and Kael, Ford and Lang, Renoir and Truffaut. Then came a whole semester of Godard, thanks to a new professor, Michael Renov (today an associate dean at the University of Southern California). "I was so Godard-damaged!" Araki recalls. If the influence is still apparent, imagine his crash landing at USC film school, where he was supposed to learn industry standards and the three-act structure but proved himself "a pretentious dickhead" who kept bringing up Godard. He got out with an MFA and a unique cinematic view produced by melding his influences. I've always thought that Araki's films, filled with hip music and TV-star actors, offer an index to American pop culture.

So it makes perfect sense that Araki, relaxing at the Hotel Niko in his jeans, T-shirt, and scuffed black shoes, and with his single pierced ear, would be a rocker at heart. And one who's still defiantly "old-school." Despite his TV-actor casting, he claims not to follow television.

As for the Internet, it bores him. And downloading music? Nope. "I love CDs. I have thousands of them. I like to be able to hold the music in my hand, and see the art." The rocker is different now, shorn of the old wink, removed from the pomo style and satiric delivery of yore. Departing from the original stories that have always been his signature, Araki has adapted Scott Heim's 1995 novel into a wondrous, beautiful, and disturbing fable about adolescence, pedophilia, extraterrestrial abduction, trauma, and sexuality. Mysterious Skin resonates deeply, transporting viewers into the dark universe of a troubled childhood, precisely because Araki set irony aside. Also left behind are the songs that made his films so top-pop playable. Instead, he commissioned his first original score, from his idols the ambient music legend Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie. (The first film score for both, it will be released this month by Commotion Records.) Araki credits the score with the film's success in transporting the audience back to a childhood time of dreams and violations. "This was called 'shoegazer' music because of the way that the bands would come out onstage and just look at their shoes instead of the audience. It has a dreaminess, a melancholy, with lush washes of guitar that take you away." Hmm, maybe that's it. But I suspect something bigger, as if a sort of harmonic convergence has taken hold: Araki's chops as a director, his genius with actors, his years of fearlessness with subject matter, have conspired to transform the biggest risk of his career into a masterpiece. (B. Ruby Rich)