Sean Penn, Best Actor, 'Milk': Nobody Does It Better

Esquire (March 2009) now on stands: includes Sean Penn exclusive by Richard T Kelly

This month's Esquire is, in the journalistic sense, my first-ever cover-story, which feels like rather a special moment, to be frank. No-one who knows me has expressed the slightest surprise that the subject of said cover-story happens to be Sean Justin Penn, but then they know me too well. For the many readers who have never heard of me but are intrigued by SJP, I hope the piece proves useful, and - who knows? - might even lead them toward a spot of further reading, specifically Sean Penn: His Life and Times.

One snippet of Sean on Harvey: ‘It did strike me that there could never be a better actor to play Harvey Milk than Harvey Milk. That’s rarely the case: usually you figure you can create a more charismatic character, or else they’ll just cast someone better-looking than the real guy… But Harvey’s particular dear quality was very unusual.’

Need I add that there's plenty more great stuff within these covers this month, including a very useful piece on the '50 Funniest Books Ever Written'? It's a grand selection even though it doesn't have room for Flashman or The Rules of Attraction, and favours Summer Lightning over The Code of the Woosters for some odd reason best known to the literary agent Peter Straus.

The movie reviewed in my regular column is the wonderful Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for which my feelings grow yet more dear even as day by day the picture, most unhappily, is marked yet more woundingly with the stigma of Expected Loser at every Awards Ceremony still to be held in this long-drawn-out Awards Season...

Harvey Milk, Sean Penn, politics and good practice

This blog has an unalloyed positive view of the life and works of Sean Justin Penn, based on wisdom dearly bought. So there’s not much point in my discussing the quality of performance, say, in Gus Van Sant’s new bio-pic of the slain San Francisco gay activist/politician Harvey Milk, which I saw last week, and in which SJP plays the lead. I would say, though, that you learn a lot about Harvey Milk and about San Francisco, and Milk is also very interesting about politics in general, and the issue of what political power could do for homosexuals in particular.

Milk was a true grassroots pol: he helped make the Castro ‘the Castro’, and made the pink pound work for the gay community there and not for anti-gay business. He was militant about the issue of being unabashedly ‘out’. Once Milk had consolidated San Francisco’s gay vote and got himself elected supervisor, the city mayor Moscone really needed him, and he could then make things happen. But he also positioned the gay movement as part of a broader progressive cause.

He was nice to lesbians. He was a passionate but unfussy and inclusive speaker. He had a good eye for a public interest photo-op, evinced by an unlikely campaign against dogs fouling pavements (which would get him elected in London too). And he got the Teamsters behind him – this stunned me, actually – by aiding a boycott of the non-union Coors beer company, and persuaded Coors to hire gay truckers in return. This is what you might call audaciously hopeful stuff. So you can see the usefulness of this movie getting itself released this month…