It’s like this for me:

Milk is Sean Penn’s most nuanced, out-of-body performance since Jeff Spicoli (at right, Fast Times at Ridgemont High):

From rolling out of a van in a cloud of marijuana smoke and having a pizza delivered to your very spunky 15-year old self in History class to being assassinated at 48 in your office by a deranged councilman, famously high on Twinkies, and collapsing against the window in slow ghastly motion while you dreamily focus on the San Francisco Opera House across the way and hear in your dwindling head a lament from the finale of Tosca, a musical motif that crops up several times in the film as a foreshadowing device for it is the aria of a man standing before a firing squad, regretting that he will never again see the stars.

The stars, one hopes, will not only twinkle again for Sean, they will spell out his name on Oscar night, this Sunday, February 22.

Thanks to Jeff and Harvey, the stoner and the stoned, the two arctic poles of an otherwise much ballyhooed and overrated career, Sean Penn has redeemed himself at last.

For years, Sean Penn was the Ham’s Ham. Everybody loved him — except me. I found his shtick whiny, his theatrics tedious, the cigarette smoke curling around his nostrils as he opined weightily across the table from Charlie Rose cloying. This, I confess, confused me, because really I love hams. Big over-the-top oinkers rampaging through a scene and leaving everyone behind as road kill. I regard Al Pacino and Bette Davis as equal masters of the art — the art of giving one hundred percent of themselves one hundred percent of the time.

But with Sean Penn, a little bit went a long way and even that wore out its welcome fast.

Until Milk.

In Milk, I saw a disciplined actor who pulled back on the stunts and — as they say reverently on The Actor’s Studio — gave himself to the work. His Harvey Milk was pitch-perfect.

Usually when actors play gay guys they either go flying out of their loafers (Ground Control to Major Tom. Put down the magenta boa and step away from the sparkly thong) or they go overboard on the nobility and bonhomie. The guyness as opposed to the gayness. How much they like sports and hearty beers and happy horse shit like that.

Well-meaning, stereotype-challenging, vetted no doubt by the Human Rights Campaign, but still utter horse manure.

I love that Penn played Milk with just the right touch of nelliness: the little gleam that would come into his eyes, the subtle way he would soften his line readings, the dizzy comedian that would spring goofily out of him during his political speeches and warm up his single-minded commitment to gay equality. The making out with James Franco — a favorite question of the media, as in the breathless what was it like? –was easy by comparison, but even that was correctly judged, more rough than tender, the way it is in life.

I was so caught up in his performance that Gus van Sant’s heavy use of documentary footage, which could easily have been intrusive, seemed of a piece with the movie reality. And who can forget those mind-blowing opening credits, the police footage of a gay bar being raided, cameras thrust into men’s faces, some hiding under jackets pulled up over their ears, others looking utterly ruined, and the unmistakable air of prurience and glee as the police cameraman zooms about. This set up the documentary device nicely, as well as the ambiance of the time, putting us in the right frame of mind to appreciate what Harvey Milk did when he stepped up to the mike in the era of Anita Bryant and gave his trademark introduction. “My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you.”

Penn carried that film. There were times I thought he even looked like Harvey Milk. That’s the magic of a powerful performance because, of course, Penn looks nothing like the lanky, awkward-stepping , long-faced Milk.

What can I say? For Oscars, I’m pulling for Sean. Yes, that makes me a cliché, but here I stand, I can do no other.

I know the odds are on Mickey Rourke, but I don’t get Rourke — himself once the Ham’s Ham before he went apeshit.

There’s Cher plastic surgery, and then there’s gruesome Mickey Rourke plastic surgery. Cher merely looks no longer human and like if she bends back too far her face will fly off. She’s simply wearing a mask of her face, frozen in a moment of mild, youthful surprise — such is the artist formerly known as Cher.

But Cher is fabulous. Cher is a woman. Mickey, on the other hand. Oh, gawd! What kind of weird karmic atonement is he toiling through? It was hard enough sitting through the trailer of The Wrestler. Everything looked like it had been filmed on dismal cloudy days where the light gave no contrast. Just two grinding hours of Travels through Flatland with nicotine teeth and grungy, perspiring gyms.

Then there’s that much promoted clip of Mickey in close-up, emoting and leaking water from his face. But who can listen to whatever the hell he’s saying because you’re just stunned by the slab of a meatface that takes over the whole screen, how nothing is moving, how the only touching thing about the scene is not the Oscar tears but how mutilated the guy looks!

If he gets the Oscar, it will be like the year they gave away a nomination to Patricia Neal for losing half her brain in, I think, a car accident. Or was she kicked by a horse?

I just don’t want Oscars to Brokeback me again. Passing over the best film — the only movie anyone still talks about three years later — for a contrived bit of claptrap about crisscrossing paths and social levels where rich men and poor men finally meet in one big-assed, knuckle-grazing metaphor posing as a car crash. It was called, brilliantly, Crash, to help the slow kids keep up. Anyone remember it?

So Academy members — and I know you read Nightcharm, you rascals — don’t Eddie Murphy my Sean Penn. Don’t rob another actor of the Oscar the world knows he deserves!

This piece is running concurrently on Outrate.net in a slightly different form, as part of Mark Adnum’s forum on the film Milk.

© 2009, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com