“Don’t leave us in the dark.” a boy’s voice cries at the close of Morrissey’s “Billy Budd.” it’s a sample from David Lean’s 1948 adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, adding campy directness to the sly poignancy of that unexpected affirmative-action love song/sob story (“I took my job application into town/Did you hear they turned me down?/Yes and it’s all because of us/And what was in our eyes”). New York dramaturge Seth Michael Donsky uses similar strategy in his first film, Twisted, transposing Oliver Twist to the contemporary dark.

That would be Giuliani-time heartlessness, a world where defenseless, damaged people two gay white hustlers, Angel (David Norona) and Fine Art (Jean Loup), who encounter Lee, a black homeless boy (Keiven McNeil Graves)-succumb to urban cruelty. Filmed primarily at night, Twisted’s schematic could be fashionably labeled “noir,” but Donsky never goes chic. Taking a dramatist’s approach to the demi-temptation monde, he scrutinizes subconscious motivations, urges and whims that seem only to come out—to intensify—at night. Each of his lead characters is a desperate young man, fatherless, yet attached to an inadequate father figure—Lee’s ineffectual street mentor Can Man (Ray Aranha), who sings him gospel lullabies; Angel’s pimp, Eddie (Anthony Crivello), who is also a brutalizing lover; and the wizened old procurer Andre (William Hickey), who runs a house of hustlers including Fine Art. These characters are clearly defined within Donsky’s experimental plot structure that cross-cuts scenes of Lee’s abandonment by the child welfare system (from foster homes to stressed social workers) with Angel’s and Fine Art’s foundering in New York’s Nightworld.

Donsky first aligns grim scenarios (murders, beatings, betrayals) until he hits on an emotional rhyme: Can Man’s ironic spirituals, sung on benches and in alleys, get a secular equivalent in a new composition by Angel, an aspiring songwriter. Angel presents it to Shiniqua (Billy Porter), the drag-queen performer at the pick-up joint where he buses, who improvises a more commanding melody than Angel came up with on his guitar. “It’s sung right, it’s written wrong!” she insists, flaunting an adaptable self-knowledge the other boys lack.  Shiniqua is shown as the hustler scene’s only redemption; her strong shoulders and plump red lips comfort Angel. She’s what Lee, Angel and Fine Art seek, yet can’t hold on to—a mother, a tender father.

But the broken-family analogy isn’t foremost. Donsky’s narrative is driven by a compassionate response to social degradation. Accurately showing savage depersonalization in the gay underworld, he needn’t comment on it any more than Morrissey does in asshole character-studies like “Spring-Heeled Jim” or “Papa Jack"; his specifics locate a recognizable social temper and Twisted’s plot carries a humane vision that, true to Dickens, inspires rage.

At its most poignant, Twisted feels like an affirmative-action tale speaking directly to the way gay culture submits itself to desensitized practices; a reflection of the larger culture’s degradation. This core realism prevents Donsky’s homoerotic fantasy from being turgid—it gets sentimental, but that’s okay; a film that looks this plainly at self-defeating people earns the right to evoke pity. Angel (whom Norona makes a ringer for Monty Clift’s troubled masochism) and Fine Art (a trickster in hair as blondined as Richard Gere’s was in his second film, Baby Blue Marine seem doomed by their prettiness and youth. Donsky’s infatuation with corruption, though fictional, creates a more honest—and fascinating view of the world than Clint Eastwood’s stolid, puritanical Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. He has imaginatively dressed a social schematic in porno-temptation, whereas Eastwood’s nervousness about blacks, gays, transsexuals and Southerners turns that whole film ludicrous.

Scenes of little Lee's hallucinated/recalled trampling reinforce images of all the characters’ immediate trap. When Fine Art betrays Lee’s friendship and tries to sell him to an undercover cop, the revelations are awkwardly set up, but Donsky locks in on the moment innocence is ensnared in decadence. Even with Donsky’s background of live-theater expressionism showing through (shadows, apparitional characters sharing space with real ones), it’s jolting—the essential betrayal of trust is paralleled with Angel’s hellish backroom exploitation between Eddie and a john. lt’s anti-libertine: Donsky zeroes in on Eddie’s viriie pose as a desperate front for terror—he supplies Crivello the missing key to Giancarlo Esposito’s similar role of abuser in the 1994 Fresh, a specious view of urban living.

“Life,” says Andre, “as indecent as it may be, is, after all, life.” Donsky puts that theme, his ambiguity, in the mouth of the film’s most pathetic character—the exploiter of youth suffering his own despair. Hickey, as ghoulish as Peter Lorre in M, plays Everyqueen’s nightmare—a fantasized conversation telling his dead mother, “I've grown old.” She answers, “No, you have become old, but you have not grown.” Blatant as this is, Donsky connects every gay adult’s concern for lost innocence to social deprivation, including gay ghetto oppression/corruption. But he knows better than to settle on blame. As shrewd as Dickens, he makes Lee stand for the idealized, remembered part of themselves Angel mourns, Fine Art despises and only Shiniqua protects. A genuinely daring attempt at something deeply felt.

Twisted at least comes without the breeder sanctimony about children that pails The Sweet Hereafter. The “Don’t leave us in the dark” that haunts Morrissey’s tale defines Donsky’ s purpose: he uses Dickens to illuminate the mainstream. Nancy and Bill Sikes' summation of sex and violence in Oliver Twist, repeated in all the entanglements here, is no longer a separate heterosexual frisson, but part of the entire soul-exploitation social critique. it’s an unusual sensibility that allows for so complex an expression. This rare trade of language and empathy—Lean’s of Dickens’; Morrissey’s of Lean’s; Donsky’s of Dickens’——shows modern artists’ evolving alertness. Most politicians and pundits distract from urban dilemmas with inept language and badly reasoned metaphors. Twisted reminds you that the term “Dickensian” might replace “Draconian,” because it evokes the drama of today’s severe, inflexible, harsh society.

Donsky gets all of this in portraying the crushing world of pimps and street kids. The aura of gay romance may not replace Dickens’ galvanizing plotting, but add the inevitable disillusionment and it’s a welcome illustration of the political sense most filmmakers reject as ill will.

Dickens also figures in Good Will Hunting - when a precocious, almost jailbait, orphan is told, “You think i know all about you be— cause I read Oliver Twist.” That relationship between a therapist and patient—is sunnily above-board. (“Could this be considered sexual harassment?” the boy asks when they embrace. His mentor assures him: “Only if you grab my ass.”) Resolving all the, issues that make Twisted twisted, this comedy—Gus Van Sant’s latest homoerotic romance ignores the surreptitious yearnings Donsky essays. To borrow a Good Will Hunting expression, Donsky “putts from the rough,” preferring a social, rather than psychological, impression. He authenticates cultural complexes related to male-male desire and urban pressure, but doesn’t settle them. in this sense Donsky seems doomed to a ghettoized vision, though his perspective may simply be genuinely, legitimately “in the dark.”

Twisted admits compunction that Van Sant has readjusted— through success, his prerogative not to be a gay representative and his humorous sense of character. Forsaking social tragedy (his subject in Mala Noche) for the ultimate fantasy of inclusion and wide sexual possibility, Van Sant looks at his star Matt Damon with wonder, while Donsky views his actors as characters—with sympathy for their rarely acknowledged plight. This makes Twisted a tough film where Good Will Hunting has an accomplished ease. its hope is more stirring than Twisted’s despair, because as each of its characters steps sweetly toward progress and health, it presumes a goal that seems impossible in Donsky’s worldview.

These two films are perfect examples of how American cinema splits deep emotions into real and fanciful perceptions. In Good Will Hunting it’s mainly achieved by dimply Matt Damon-—the paragon of sincerity in Geronimo: An American Legend and The Rainmaker whose clear-blue, earnest stare suggests heroic purity. As Damon (and co-star Ben Affleck) have contrived Good Will Hunting’s entertaining script, these actors seems to understand playing heroism better than most filmmakers. When Damon walks in on a fight between his benefactors—a battle for his soul—the wonderfully prodigious look on his face suggests a boy who can be anything but he doesn’t risk the need Art Alexakis sings of in Everclear’s “Father of Mine” (“Take me to a place that is so hard to reach”) or that Donsky laments about young men who have had their potential stomped.

By sublimating homoeroticism into a “healthy” icon and competition purged of eroticism, Good Will Hunting creates confounding appeal: it offers a sexual model of perfect, chaste relationships—a Hollywood movie. And that’s the lie Donsky is working against. He uses Dickens the way Van Sant used Shakespeare in My Own Private Idaho to enlarge a personally observed phenomenon of feigned or fatuous or achingly complicated loyalties. Frequently disengaging from some of the script’s structured sentiments, Van Sant shows a good, Jude the Obscure skepticism about ambition and satisfaction, distinguishing different levels of friendship among Will Hunting’s blue-collar friends and intellectual handlers. He knows the elitism in class divisions and can t—won’ t—criticize. It’s rich stuff, but Twisted convinces me we cannot ignore what Van Sant leaves out.