Long-delayed ‘Milk’ now looks timely

Long before making “Milk,” the film that opened Wednesday about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, director Gus Van Sant imagined a scene in which the voluble, charismatic Milk was dressed as Ronald McDonald. In that version, Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who shot and killed Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978, was deep in a “sugar-infused rage” and “envisioned himself as the Twinkie sheriff and he shot Mayor McCheese, and Harvey was Ronald McDonald.”

Van Sant laughingly calls this his Charlie Kaufman take on Milk’s story —- although, perhaps it’s the sad nature of reality that White claimed during his trial that junk food had fueled his behavior —- the infamous “Twinkie defense.”

“I offered it to both Sean Penn and Tom Cruise, but I was really inept as a producer,” says Van Sant, who recalls he then just sat and waited for them to call back. And waited. And waited. And never followed up. “I completely dropped the ball from the very first and it sort of washed into a sea of however many offers they get every day.”

That was in the mid-’90s. It’s a decade later, the afternoon of the Los Angeles premiere of “Milk,” the more straightforward telling of the story that Van Sant made. Dressed in baggy jeans and a blue top, the 56-year-old director is sitting on the deck of his unpretentious modernist home in the trendy Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, fielding phone calls about what he calls “the wedding,” i.e. that night’s gala. His parents are here, and the more traditional-looking Gus Van Sant Sr. is reading by the swimming pool.

Few American directors have a body of work as varied and idiosyncratic as Van Sant’s, which includes his early poignant looks at drug users and street kids (“Drugstore Cowboy” and “My Own Private Idaho”), a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” elliptical visions of Kurt Cobain’s final days (“Last Days”) and the Oscar-winning, feel-good drama “Good Will Hunting.”

In person, Van Sant seems gentle, with a nonjudgmental air, a distinct adherence to live-and-let-live. His features are rounded, his dark hair limp and his eyes seem to pop out like a cartoon character.

Although politics shape the narrative, “Milk” doesn’t play like a standard heroic-man biopic, in part because of Milk’s flamboyant demeanor, but also because of what seems to be Van Sant’s true passion —- the band of outsiders and the bonds among those on the margins who choose to make their own families.

For those who’ve ever assembled in a living room to fight apartheid, nuclear weapons, for women’s liberation, for civil rights or any social cause, Milk offers an acid flashback to what it’s like to live on that grass-roots mojo, the intoxicating mixture of idealism, fraternity and implied otherness. The mouthy, charismatic Milk, played by an unusually vulnerable and accessible Penn, is fomenting the movement and riding the crest of group yearning. He tends to his flock, portrayed on-screen by James Franco (as his longtime lover), Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill (as his lesbian campaign manager).

“Milk” has turned out to be unexpectedly topical as the culture wars over homosexuality have had a flare-up. The last bit of “Milk” is devoted to the supervisor’s successful crusade against Proposition 6, a California ballot measure in 1978 that would have banned gay teachers from the public schools. Thirty years later, Proposition 8, revising the California constitution to ban gay marriage, recently passed.

Milk challenged the conventions of what was acceptable in politics. “He was really idealistic,” says Van Sant, who adds that Milk said things that even his supporters just dreamed of thinking, such as “We can be in office. We’re gay and we’re out and we can run for office.”