Biopic of the civil rights leader Harvey Milk.

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 2011)

Very enjoyable, mainstream Hollywood biopic. It seems to me that the film does justice to Milk's career and legacy in a way that Hollywood biopics of civil rights leaders rarely do. (Spike Lee's overrated "Malcolm X," for instance, enervates its subject's radicality- suggesting that deep down, Malcolm just wanted to be accepted as an equal.) But I think part of the reason the film can do so is the problematic nature of Milk as a radical icon. While Harvey Milk displayed undeniable courage in becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office in the U.S. he still was very much a man of the system, of the machine he claimed to fight against. Milk would plant his lieutenants and have them incite insurrectional energy just so Milk could then appear and temper it, redirecting it into the voting booth. The film acknowledges this and asks us to admire Milk for it, which is why the film works on the level that it does. It is a film of the system trying to capture the "radical" energy of a man of the system.