Milk (2008)

Premise: Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) leaves New York with his boyfriend Scott Smith (James Franco) for San Francisco. He opens a small camera shop on Castro. Little by little, he becomes more political involved, fighting for gay rights in the city. Eventually, he wins a seat on city's Board of Supervisors, making him the first openly gay politician in America.

I think I might see this again.

Is there a word for the movie version of a memoir? You know how the movie version (not adaptation, mind) of a biography is a biopic? What's the word when it's just a memoir? I sense a linguistic gap here.

I love that director Gus Van Sant and writer Dustin Lance Black chose to focus on less than a decade of Milk's life. We don't need to know what Ma and Pa Milk were like. All we need to know is what got Milk to San Francisco and what happened once he got there. That's the story: the Mayor of Castroville. He picks up Scott in the subway, he offers to show him New York's gay scene (which bars to hit, which bars to avoid). Scott tells him to quit living in the closet, and -- just like that -- he does.

If you're not already a little in love with Harvey and with Harvey and Scott together by that point, I don't know what to do with you. There's something so sweet and innocent and daring about a man who can look at his life at 40, thinking nothing of it, and decide to do something about that. All of that comes across in Penn's full-bodied performance. As good as he is, for years we have been suffering under the weight of his Big Performances, all mannered and brooding, full of actorly tics. When he breaks free of that, allowing himself to childlike, passionate, and, yes, gay, Penn gives us the performance we never realized we were waiting for all along. It's exactly who he was always meant to play.

Everyone else seems equally well cast from the dedicated but tenuous Franco as Scott to Diego Luna as Latino drama queen Jack Lira to Alison Pill as Milk's tough as nails lesbian campaign manager Anne Kronenberg. The scenes in their ramshackle campaign office (Milk's camera store, which was never much of a store to begin with) flow like quicksilver, and it's hard not to get caught up in the heady rush of just trying to make a change. But then they do (finally, finally), and we run smack into Dan White (Josh Brolin).

Brolin's been a revelation in the last year or two (Goonies never say die), and he's another walking miracle here. He takes White's little boy haircut and carries it right on down into every element of his performance: an easily angered young man who tried to steadfastly hold on to tradition when the tide decidedly turned against him. It's the kind of thing that would be noble if it weren't so evil.

All that, and it was actually Emil Hirsch's big hair, big glasses, and adorable little twink walk that captured my attention. Cleve Jones must be a force of nature.

The combination of Van Sant and Black is a special gift: in the midst of telling this deeply person-specific story, they find time for sympathy for White and room to develop the minor characters. Most of all, they make narration seem not only necessary but also right. It's Harvey's story. Why shouldn't he be the one to tell it? A-