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I think it touched a nerve here because of all the things it’s about–the Castro in the 70s, the politics of coming out, the gay-rights movement, Milk as a person–it’s first and foremost a movie about local politics. It is, to borrow an overused term, Capra-esque about democracy and America. It’s a really patriotic film, but it’s patriotic about small business and local government, which makes it something of an anomaly in the political-movie genre.
If there’s a flaw in the movie, it’s that it elides his pre-San Francisco, pre-coming-out training as Harvey Milk, a Wall Street suit (actuary turned stock analyst) and serious theater hobbyist (he was an associate producer of Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar). At the beginning, the film portrays him as something of a nobody, a painfully anonymous businessman, who claims to have never done anything he’s proud of in his first 40 years. Which may be true, but he was undeniably successful in the (culturally) straight and conservative world with a substantial sideline business in the theater world.
