Fittingly for a film about a man who spent the final decade of his life fighting for acceptance, Milk is director Gus Van Sant’s most mass-appealing movie since Finding Forrester in 2000.

But, he clearly understands his responsibility in dramatising the life of gay rights champion Harvey Milk.

Sloughing off the impenetrable artsiness of his recent movies, Van Sant has fashioned a conventional biopic accessible to all and centring around the taped autobiography Milk recorded to be played in the event of his untimely death.

The central character’s life fits the Hollywood biopic mould snugly: closet case uses mid-life crisis and 60s counterculture as a rebirth and begins battling for gay rights, withstanding the brickbats of homophobia and a national campaign of discrimination.

Winning a seat as a supervisor in San Francisco's City Hall, he continues to do more good but his life is cruelly cut short by an unhinged co-worker (this is revealed during the opening moments via archival footage for those unfamiliar with Milk’s life).

It’s ironic that even though the real-life Milk achieved so much for gay rights, in the thirty years since his death there is not an openly gay actor with the clout to sell the movie (don’t get us wrong, we love Rupert Everett but… you know). 

But, dour, earnest Sean Penn displays the range of his talent with a spirited, playful, heartfelt and crucially magnetic performance.

Whether winning the support of the Teamsters by organising a gay boycott of the union-unfriendly Coors brewery, disarming wary voters with his innate charm, or staging a near-riot so he can then diffuse it, Penn puts on another Oscar-worthy show.

Bravely, Milk also depicts intimate, loving homosexual relationships, with Franco, Hirsch and Diego Luna all in Brokeback Mountain mode.

Van Sant also marks his subject’s life by the different stages of discrimination.  From the opening credits’ photo-montage of gay arrests during the 60s to the continued brutality of queer bashing and nationwide campaign to ban gay teachers from schools (the notorious 'Proposition 6'), the director is at pains to point out gay life is often anything but.

Employing newsreel footage of singer Anita Bryant’s campaign against gay rights (think an American Mary Whitehouse), and Milk’s central role in fighting Prop. 6, Milk is especially relevant: 2008’s general election saw the thumbs-up given to Proposition 8, forbidding same-sex marriage. It appears a gay president is still some way off.

Kudos however for not turning Dan White - Milk’s troubled, menacing assassin - into a one-dimensional bogeyman.  Josh Brolin’s ever-growing turmoil of rage, perceiving Milk’s popularity and professional success to be a conspiracy against him, is a model of believable psychosis.

Van Sant may indulge in the odd flourish of melodrama, but this compelling biopic is proof of what an engaging director he can be when not filming his own belly-button fluff.
 

Rob Daniel