Penn becomes a politician in a way he never did as Willie Stark in All the King's Men. Maybe there he was too self-consciously playing a generalized upstart proletarian, a man of the people. In Milk, he plays a man of his people who realizes that he can find common ground citywide only by staying true to his constituency, even if that means shaking up the gay community's established leaders on both the left and the right.
With its message of grass-roots commitment and the galvanizing power of hope, Milk will do more than revitalize opponents of California's Proposition 8. Milk is a Barack Obama-era movie in the best way: It could keep all of Obama's followers charged up. Penn convinces you that Milk was both a self-made politician and, by the end, a natural politician. He became the kind of leader who by finding himself helped others find themselves.
Milk's assassin, Dan White, doesn't even know himself. In Josh Brolin's instinctively brilliant interpretation, White, the spokesman for traditional values who becomes Milk's prime antagonist on the Board of Supervisors, gives off the free-floating panic and dangerous vibes of an inchoate adolescent who feels his world falling down around him. The bullets he aims at Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) and Milk may cut down his perceived political enemies, but you know that White's only peace will come after the movie is over, when he turns a gun on himself.
