Milk: A-

I enjoy Milk the less I think about it, and the more time that passes.

I enjoyed Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay immediately, but not wholeheartedly. It finds character definition in voice-over or in the refracted angle of a silver whistle, or in a final weighty glance at a poster for the San Francisco Opera. There are also the conventional methods used to construct a biopic, but they’re tempered by a light touch of flamboyance—of joy. Black peppers his archival footage and ripped-from-the-headlines dialogue with humor, but his plotting, though fleet and framed by the most curiously intriguing of devices, is inelegant.

I enjoyed more what director Gus Van Sant does, as he finally bursts free from years of depressing stylistic tics. The Van Sant in control of Milk is the same Van Sant who wrote and directed the “Le Marais” segment of Paris, je t’aime—a man who finds the vibrancy in a casually poignant sexual life: a sort of anti-Woody Allen in that he sets up casual connections without also chaining them together with psycho-sexual significance. He glides through his story, bouncing from one true story to another in the life of some pretty incredible people. His film stock roughens at times, dating itself even as its ploy for sincerity is effective and the past is allowed to seep into the present. At others he side-steps a moment to brighten up the entire film with grand swoops of fervor—as with the rainbow-colored telephone tree or Danny Elfman’s operatic score. He takes what is a better-than-average script and makes a better-than-average film that sags only occasionally, and charms almost consistently. No longer the downer who freeze-dried Elephant in its own “relevance,” this is a man who finds inspiration in inspiration—and his art resurges, joyfully, for it.

At once I completely applaud the supporting performers of Milk—like Emile Hersch, as political aid Cleve Jones, bustling with nervy charm, or James Franco as Scott Smith—and am a little put-off by them. Of all the elements in Milk, they are the least defined: sure they’re witty little gay men, huddled together and building a rebellious political machine of their own out in the Castro, but that’s all they ever are: a collective. As much as Black and Van Sant find a sort of zeitgeisty way to create and color-in-the-lines of their main character, through group demonstration, or as he stands on a soap box protesting to the masses, the same methods can’t be said to be effective with the surrounding cast. Friends, lovers, allies, all—save Dan White (who Josh Brolin gives a twinkling sort of psychosis all by his repressed-self)—just sort of remain on the sidelines, even as they catapult occasionally to the forefront.

Yet all of that is for naught. Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, the man who would upset the status quo in the 1970s with his tireless fight for gay rights, is so comfortable in someone else’s skin (and he’s such a competent physical mimic) that even the film’s flaws are built into his performance—he makes even cinematic inconsistencies delightful. Fearlessly fey, but with a cool pragmatic sensibility, Penn’s Milk is at once a stereotype upended, and that same stereotype writ large. Paradoxically, it makes his life, refracted through both sensibilities, all the more rich.

And, too, it makes his death all the sadder. I’m not one to choke up at movies, and I didn’t here, but the heft of Milk is in its persistence, it dogged pursuit of betterment. And in the current climate, couldn’t we all learn a little from Mr. Milk when he said “You’ve got to give ‘em hope”?