Milking Good Acting for All It's Worth

I meant to do a combo review, but time is getting away from me. Take what I have so far.

A pioneering homosexual district supervisor and a disgraced Republican president make an unlikely duo. This winter, you'll find these 1970s icons, Harvey Milk and Richard Nixon, in some of the same multiplexes in two absorbing, Oscar-nominated dramas with towering lead performances.

Sean Penn smiles! Sean Penn can be ebullient! Sean Penn's immense range includes "joy!" Milk, Gus van Sant's biopic of the rise and death of America's first openly gay politician, is a marvel in casting; just about every portrayer is a ringer for his or her real-life counterpart. Although Milk ends with death, this tale of 1970s San Francisco oozes life.

Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black do several things right. First, they present Harvey Milk not as a martyr (although they beat the death premonitions heavily) but as a funny, shrewd, distracted businessman, politician and lover.

"Politics is about theater. It isn't about winning; it's about making a statement," Harvey explains as he makes run after run before being elected supervisor of District 5. He's not a one-issue candidate: We see Harvey forging alliances with the unions over Coors and reaching out to the conservative Dan White (Josh Brolin). He's also caught up in his work, to the detriment of relationships with longtime lover Scott (James Franco) and unstable boyish Jack (Diego Luna, a love story not well-developed).

The filmmakers don't muffle Harvey's flamboyance. Three years after the chaste love scenes in Brokeback Mountain, Milk depicts Penn picking up Franco in a subway station and bringing him home the same night - within the first five minutes of the movie. Penn's speech pattern and body language are in your face, daring the Dan Whites of the audience to squirm. Yet Harvey is so charming and open it's easy to accept him.

Van Sant recreates the Castro of the 1970s and incorporates actual footage and newspaper articles of the era. Black engaged in meticulous research, speaking with 40 or so people from campaign manager Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) to Milk protege and AIDS-quilt founder Cleve Jones (a stunning Emile Hirsch). This makes Milk feel more documentary than biography.

In a stroke of good timing for distributor Focus Features, Milk parallels the Proposition 8 fight in California with the failure of Proposition 6, which would have mandated the firing of gay teachers. (Anita Bryant, who led the battle for Prop 6, is the one person Van Sant didn't cast: She appears only in television clips.) Milk also echoes the election of another minority hope-filled politician, the one occupying the White House. Harvey notes that hope can't be all one has, but "without hope, life's not worth living."