(Enlarge) Sean Penn stars as slain San Francisco gay rights activist Harvey Milk in the new docudrama "Milk," opening Friday, Dec. 5 at area theaters. (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)

We need "Milk" as a reminder that any civil rights movement endures frustrating setbacks on the road to equality. Director Gus Van Sant's film about the late San Francisco gay rights activist Harvey Milk enlivens a potentially predictable biopic formula and Sean Penn's brilliant performance as Milk seems likely to garner awards recognition.

Already the subject of a documentary film, Milk is an iconic leader who will need no introduction for some viewers. In any event, Van Sant opens the film by immediately reminding every viewer that Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were gunned down by a disgruntled fellow politician named Dan White in 1978.

The editing scheme throughout "Milk" reinforces that sense of fatality by periodically incorporating scenes of Harvey Milk alone at his kitchen table, dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder, and ruminating that people might listen to these recollections should he be killed for his beliefs. As a result, the film is more meditative than suspenseful as it takes us through major events in his life.

If anything, Van Sant is so eager to get into the personalities and incidents that made his subject's relatively short life so full that he basically ignores Milk's origins. This is one of the few miscalculations in a generally very smart movie. Although we don't need stereotypical flashbacks to primal scenes from Milk's youth, Van Sant should have found a way to give us more factual information about the early years.

Instead, "Milk" anxiously rushes into the busy period when Harvey Milk moves to San Francisco, opens a camera shop, becomes involved in politics, and eventually wins an election as a city supervisor. Adroitly mixing archival TV news footage with dramatized events, Van Sant immerses us in an era when San Francisco was sociologically at a boiling point in terms of hippies, gays and conservative forces jousting for political power.

There's obviously no doubt where the director's sympathies are in these hotly argued debates, but it's refreshing that Van Sant does not demonize any of the demographic factions. It's hardly surprising that Harvey Milk is presented as being on the side of the saints, in a secular sense of that term, but it's hilariously clear that Milk is no saint.

His personal love life is a mess, his political tactics can be as brusque as those of any old ward boss, and his hectic schedule allows for enough hedonistic episodes to make him an unlikely citywide political candidate in a big city that's like a small town when it comes to everybody knowing your business.

The film's boisterous mixture of comedy and drama inevitably tilts toward the tragic as Milk increasingly tangles with a conservative fellow city supervisor, Dan White. Josh Brolin does a first-rate job of conveying the confusion and anger that make White a powder keg waiting for a match.

While the screenplay by Dustin Lance Black certainly does not excuse White's deadly actions, it does encourage a measure of sympathy for a troubled politician who is totally stressed out over political and personal financial pressure.

The strong supporting performances include Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, James Franco and Alison Pill as members of Milk's inner circle of friends, and Victor Garber as a mayor trying to govern a feisty city.

It's ultimately Penn's movie, of course, and the actor tempers the anger you expect from his previous performances with an engaging sense of humor as Harvey Milk devises an array of rhetorical tactics to further his cause. Although you always know where this story is headed, you won't want to miss a minute of its trip through the 1970s. Grade: A-

"Milk" (R) opens Friday, Dec. 5 at area theaters.

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