Sean Penn’s inhabitation of the real life Harvey Milk is arguably 2008’s most mesmerizing acting performance and one of the two or three best of the accomplished and overrated grandstander’s career. To his credit, the method actor goes a long way toward perpetuating the “best-of-his-generation” moniker into perpetuity.
Penn — with the chops, but not the charm or complexion of a conventional movie star — creates a multidimensional man, making a long-dead human being appear alive. Milk is passionate and flawed, and further ahead of his time than most cultural spectators realized 30 years ago when he suffered a sensationally tragic death at the smoking-gun fingertips of former policeman and firefighter, and fellow city councilman, Dan White (Josh Brolin, increasingly reliable).
Lactose intolerant? Most people looking for secondary and tertiary chances at life, aiming to reinvent themselves, follow redemption’s tempting call to a place without
long-term memory, without the time to hold grudges, like, say, The Big Apple. Not Harvey Milk. In the early ‘70s he and his partner Scott Smith (James Franco) sought a brand-new-start-of-it far away from East coast dinginess and density. Emerging as an influential left coast haven for hippies and homosexuals, the restless 40-ish New Yorker gravitated toward the left wing’s political epicenter — San Francisco.
Shortly after moving to the Bay Area, Harvey Milk opened up a neighborhood camera store in the flamboyant Castro Street district. But he had deeper urges within aching for satisfaction. He wanted to promote a sense of commonwealth among likeminded people — to advocate for and protect the rights of the disenfranchised. For Milk, this meant advancing gay rights. He believed that the city offered the furtive seeds of growth the homosexual community needed to build a coalition of responsible and influential gay and lesbian citizens, people deserving equal footing alongside other accepted classes of people. Following the lead of disgruntled black leaders who were attempting to overcome parallel challenges within their own community, Milk and his tight knit network of directionless compatriots — some past and future lovers, like Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch, a frisky eye-catching performance among a stellar cast) — decided the best way for him to affect change was to become a San Francisco city-county councilman.
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