Transcending merely the gay rights movement, San Francisco City Councilman Harvey Milk was a messianic figure to many in the late 1970s, and Gus Van Sant’s biographical film gives the slain public figure his due recognition as a naturally born leader though it’s been over 30 years since his assassination by a disgruntled colleague.

Fully inhabiting Milk’s persona is Sean Penn after the role was long rumored to be going to Robin Williams. It goes without saying that Penn gives one of the bravest and most convincing performances of 2008 and the part should bring him an Oscar in a field where all nominees are well-deserving of recognition. Penn wholly becomes Milk for the length of the film, which chronicles the activist’s life from his 1970 move from his native New York to San Francisco where he sought some manner of asylum and had few intentions of becoming political until he sensed the injustices heaped upon the gay community in the nascent gay scene of the mid-1970s. Told through a flashback set in November 1978, Van Sant’s film asserts more than once that Milk forecasted his slaying much like Martin Luther King Jr. predicted that he might not live to see the realization of his own dreams of human equality.

In fact, more so than a film about a pioneer of gay rights, MILK posits its titular character as a champion for rights of all peoples, and draws parallels to other movements in the outgrowth of America’s cultural revolutionary period of the 1960s and 1970s, including civil rights, women’s rights and others of the time. Certainly, Harvey Milk became active block-by-block in San Francisco’s famed Castro district, just six blocks square, but built an entire statewide campaign against Anita Bryant and her anti-gay legislation that road-showed around the US in the late 70s. By the time of that Proposition 6, an initiative to fire gay teachers and those who support them from California schools, Milk was at last an elected official after several close but failed attempts, and worked tirelessly to defeat the proposition, which ultimately failed by a stated 2-to-1 margin.

Ultimately, Harvey Milk’s entire political life was altogether amazingly brief and was senselessly cut short by a competitive conservative on the San Francisco City Council, Dan White (knocked out of the park by a spot-on Josh Brolin), whose own demons led to the demise of at least three people, including himself. One is left to wonder what Milk would have done as a gay activist and humanist in the succeeding AIDS crisis and the current California and national cultural wars over gay marriage. Surely, there is a great deal of irony in releasing a film about a 30-year-old California proposition concerning gay rights just as another anti-gay initiative, Proposition 8, was maturing.

One can picture Penn’s Harvey Mllk lobbying against Prop 8 in the fall of 2008, standing on a makeshift stage with bullhorn in hand, 78 years old, speaking to voters, crying out, “I’m Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.” Clearly, both the movement and the message could have used his genuine persona and pure soul in recent times. Regardless of the timing of the film, Penn’s Milk is a character you are not likely to soon forget and his story should be examined by all persons, regardless of race, religion, or orientation, for, as Milk himself asked, pointing to a founding US slogan, “aren’t all men created equal?”