The Thousands

Harvey Milk is the gay community’s Martin Luther King: an openly gay politician who agitated for equal civil rights and encouraged homosexuals to abandon the closet. He was gunned down in 1978 by a disgruntled fellow San Francisco city supervisor, Dan White.

Gus Van Sant’s simultaneously intimate and sweeping biopic incorporates real archive footage: the opening sequence showing arrests at 60s gay bars is especially powerful. But it’s equally about a more carefree time in gay culture: sex and love aren’t furtive or desperately meaningful, BROKEBACK-style, but playful and affectionate… and nobody yet has AIDS.

Milk covers Harvey’s final eight years, from closeted 40-year-old to martyr. James Franco and Josh Brolin are surefooted as Harvey’s lover Scott and the enigmatic White, but as Harvey, Sean Penn is a revelation. He breathes such wit and exuberance into this character that you completely forget he can glower for America. Van Sant, too, retreats from his trademark inscrutable romanticism. There are lyrical moments – close-ups of Harvey and Scott gazing into each others eyes; a tortured White naked under a window – but this is storytelling as inexorable as the change Harvey demanded.