But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic.
Van Sant, maker of Good Will Hunting and Elephant, is most eloquent when he is least emphatic. He opens his film with '60s-era footage of police arresting gay men and cramming them into wagons like dogcatchers seizing rabid mutts. This climate of fear shaped the New York-born Milk, 40, who is introduced as he cheekily picks up a youth half his age (James Franco, terrific as Scotty Smith) on a subway platform.
Milk is a closeted suit who kicks the door down, emerging in tight jeans and love beads and encouraging others in the Castro, his adopted San Francisco neighborhood, to do the same. The difference between the subdued New York Harvey and his flamboyant San Francisco self-creation is that between Clark Kent and Superman.
As Penn incarnates him, Harvey is Supermagnet, a guy who attracts men who initially find him repulsive, charms straights who find his sexual preference offensive, and builds a coalition of gays, unionists and senior citizens to elect him district supervisor, as San Franciscans call their councilperson.
He was a skillful politician who impressed the opposition because he didn't ask for political or lifestyle endorsements; he asked for jobs. To many of his constituents Harvey may have been "different," but commonality was his political agenda. If it's true that students mimic their teachers, Harvey asks a state senator who would forbid gay teachers in the classrooms, then "why is it we don't have a hell of a lot more nuns?"
