On the Long Island Expressway there are lanes going east, lanes going west, and lanes going straight to hell.
Written, produced, and directed by Michael Cuesta, the movie L.I.E. was released in 2001 and stars Paul Franklin Dano as 15-year-old Howie Blitzer, a typically troubled teenager, and Brian Cox as the pedophile who befriends him. Howie's mother died in an accident on the Long Island Expressway when he was young, and his father (Bruce Altman) has brought a new woman into what Howie still calls "Mommy's bed." Having fallen in with the wrong crowd, the boy spends his spare time breaking into his neighbors' homes and stealing their money and valuables. One night, Howie and his friend Gary - whose ambiguous sexuality confuses Howie - break into the home of Big John (Brian Cox) and steal a couple of valuable guns. Gary (Billy Kay) runs away to California, leaving Howie to work off the thousand-dollar debt owed for the loss of the guns. The 55-year-old Big John admits he wants to be intimate with Howie, despite the obvious distress this causes John's houseboy Scott. When Howie's father lands in federal prison, Big John is the only one he has left to turn to.
L.I.E. was given a rating of NC-17 despite only a few "bad words" - there is no pornography shown. Mild violence includes Howie's father punching him in the face and teenagers getting into fistfights. Lot 47, the distribution company that picked up the film from Sundance, is encouraging the addition of a new "Adult" or "Mature" rating level, to fit between R and NC-17, for films that deal with mature topics but do not show pornography or excessive violence.