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There's a certain tragedy to Sean Penn. He's a smart guy and a first-rate actor, and it is obvious that he wants to make serious, contemplative, adult movies about people who look very grim and shout sometimes and have done terrible things that haunt them. He favors these films as an actor, and he's carved out an unpopular niche for himself making these movies as a writer and director. He does them competently, and, I suppose, for people who enjoy being depressed for a while, they can always count on him to make their lives miserable for a few hours in a darkened theater.

The shame of it is, this is not the sort of thing Penn truly excels at. Instead, Sean Penn has a genuine, if often suppressed, genius for creating daffy, outrageous characters, and he's very, very good in films that flirt with being trash. It is possible to respect his serious turns in films such as 21 Grams or All the King's Men, but it is very hard to enjoy them. But give him a role like the semi-psychotic jazz guitarist Emmet Ray in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown and Penn positively crackles with a weird comic energy. He's turned in these sorts of eccentric performances, now and again, throughout his career, and they're always great fun: a paranoid lawyer in Carlito's Way; a thickheaded escaped con in We're No Angels; a nerdy would-be spy in The Falcon and the Snowman. It's no accident that one of his best-remembered performances is also one of his first: The blissed-out California stoner Jeff Spicoli in 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Penn has never again created a scene as wonderfully daffy as the one in Fast Times in which he calls a friend to demonstrate the sounds his head makes when he hits it with his shoe; neither has he again demonstrated the same virtuoso skills in comic partnership as he showed in his scenes with the film's irascible Mr. Hand, played by veteran sitcom actor Ray Walston.

I doubt we're going to get many more Spicolis out of Penn, but his Harvey Milk in the new biopic is an acceptable compromise. It isn't a fun film, precisely. The script by Dustin Lance Black is overburdened, as film biographies often are, by trying to tell too much story in too little time. Black handles it competently, and director Gus Van Sant makes enough room in the picture to show that San Francisco's burgeoning gay scene in the 1970s had never abandoned a taste for the flamboyant: one scene has Harvey Milk enter a bar on Castro Street to teasingly thank the bar owner for supporting a gay clientele, and Van Sant has every man in the bar, including Milk, strutting around without their shirts on. Nonetheless, as the film progresses, it is almost possible to imagine the filmmakers consulting a to-do list of elements of Milk's life and marking them off as completed. His slow rise in San Francisco politics feels rushed, and details are left out that really shouldn't have been. Most egregiously, the film completely leaves out San Francisco's Peoples Temple, with whom Milk had a political relationship. Jim Jones was a player in San Francisco politics, and Milk played along with him, speaking at the temple, defending the reverend, and using Peoples Temple members as volunteers in Milk's political career.

The Peoples Temple and its tragic ending in Guyana is a big story, admittedly, and it would have taken a lot of screen time to include it in the telling of Milk's life, but you simply can't tell of Milk's life without including it, for one essential reason: The mass suicide of the Jim Jones cult took place just days before Harvey Milk met his own end at the hands of fellow city supervisor Dan White, who also killed Mayor Geroge Moscone. There was considerable speculation at the time that the events were linked, although they weren't. The filmmakers obviously decided the mass suicide in Guyana was just too much to deal with and ignored it, creating a movie in which the death of 900 San Franciscans just never happened at all. But, then, this is a movie where Milk's killer, Dan White, is given almost no screen time, despite the fact that they cast Josh Brolin to play him, and Brolin is terrific. He plays White as a product of a suspicious and deeply conservative culture, and White's occasional attempts at forming political alliances -- and a friendship -- with Harvey Milk are rebuffed, humiliating him. White was a fascinating character in his own right, and Emily Mann once wrote a complicated and moving play about him called Execution of Justice, but he is given little to do in this film but skulk around the the background of most scenes.

Thankfully, if the film sometimes trips on itself in trying to retell too much of Milk's life in too short a time, at least it gets Harvey Milk right, and, as a result, gets one of the most entertaining performances we have seen from Sean Penn in years. As much as Penn might want to make movies in which he frowns and looks pained, Harvey Milk was just too camp for such a performance to work. In the 1970s, when many of America's politically minded gay men and women were making bids for respectability, Harvey Milk never abandoned an affinity for outrageousness. He was bawdy and swishy. Despite having a witty but probing intellect and an unexpected talent for forging useful political alliances, Milk probably would never have managed to get elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors had the city not reorganized itself so that people voted for representatives from their neighborhood, rather that citywide. Harvey Milk's neighborhoods, you see, were Haight-Ashbury and the Castro, and it was the perfect confluence of time and place for an out-of-the-closet and often deliberately provocative gay man to make a bid for office.

It helped Milk that he was fun. He was jokey and laughed a lot, and Penn gets this, and plays it. He does a lot of Milk right, from the man's Long Island accent, which sounds a little like Jerry Lewis and a little like an old Jewish grandmother, to Milk's uninhibited affection for the people in his life. Milk is often shown with his arms around other men, not because he is flirting with them (although there is that, too), but because he's just a guy who likes to put his arm around his friends, gay or otherwise. Penn doesn't shy away from Milk's thornier side, either: Milk could be single-minded in his politicking to an extent that often seemed like pure bullying, and he responds to the conservative Dan White by simply steamrolling the man and eventually making back-room deals against him.

But the film allows that this sort of behavior was fueled by a genuine sense of outrage as to the repression gays and lesbians experienced, dramatized in a contrived but nonetheless effective pairing of scenes in which Milk receives phone calls from a gay teenager in Minnesota who is contemplating suicide rather than continue living as a homosexual. Overflowing with compassion, Penn begs the boy to just get on a bus and go to any large city in America. It's not a great suggestion, actually; gay teenagers still flee to cities with large gay populations, to the extent that cities like Los Angeles have homeless shelters specifically to address their needs, and some of these teens wind up prostituting themselves for money. But, then, Milk came to power at a time when there just weren't many good options for young gay people. At least, in a city with an actual gay community, however clandestine, the teens would not be alone.

One such teen has a fairly substantial role in the film: Cleve Jones, a tough street kid who Milk befriends and eventually puts to work on his campaign. Jones, who went on to create the AIDS Memorial Quilt, is played by Emile Hirsch, an actor for whom Penn seems to have an affinity: Hirsch previously starred in Into the Wild, which Penn wrote and directed. Hirsch is a bit of a chameleon as an actor -- he recently played he lead role in Speed Racer, in which, in black pompadour and James Dean snarl, he looked like a Tiger Beat model. You wouldn't think it is the same actor in this film -- Hirsch's Cleve Jones is a gangly boy with a mop of curly hair and enormous glasses, who nonetheless struts around the Castro with a puffed up bravado. Hirsch is a twitchy, boyish hustler in this film, and the actor makes it clear that the sort of skills you need to be a hustler are almost identical to the skills you need to be an effective political activist. It's easy to see why Penn likes Hirsch -- he is already a superb actor, and a fearless one. Better still, Hirsch manages to be funny and weird, something Penn also does very, very well, if only he would let himself do it more often.