When I’m reflecting on a narrative, I like to consider the distance between its first and last images. It almost always teaches me something fascinating about the the story.

For instance, in the first image of Romeo and Juliet, two servants playfully roughhouse on an empty street.  In the final image, a massive community gathers around dead bodies in a tomb. If you think about it, we see the shadow of the conclusion in the very first moment of the play: The threat of violence is already there in miniature, waiting to drag the entire world into death.

I’m happy I applied  this technique to Milk, the sensational new film about the life and assassination of Harvey Milk. The movie’s first and last images encapsulate why it moves me.

I’ll explain what I mean after the jump…

To begin, we see black and white footage of gay men being hauled out of shadowy bars and shoved by police into crowded paddy wagons. In the final image, we see color footage of a massive candlelight vigil for San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and city mayor George Moscone, who were murdered in City Hall by former city supervisor Dan White. Shot from an aerial view, the light goes on and on and on.

What a difference from the opening scene, where gay man are yanked from the darkness and shoved into shadowy cars. Even the footage doesn’t have color. But at the end, thousands of candles overpower the night.

It’s important that director Gus Van Sant neither ends nor begins the film with an image of Harvey Milk (or Sean Penn playing Harvey Milk.) That’s because Milk is about more than its title character.

As much as it lionizes its hero, the movie exalts the community he belonged to. It shows us that gay America existed before and after Harvey Milk, and that he was one of many who knocked the hinges off its closet doors.

When I think about Milk in terms of those images, I see that everything between them tells more than one man’s story. Sure, Harvey Milk is the protagonist, and we learn more about him than anyone else, but even he has several lines about belonging to a movement that’s bigger than himself.

The film reflects that claim in its enormous cast of characters, in its many crowd scenes, and in its wide-angle images that remind us how much space surrounds one person.

And we can fill that space ourselves. Van Sant suggests that we are part of the movement, too. Harvey Milk may have advanced gay liberation, but all of us–no matter our sexuality–are involved in that liberation today, even if we’re trying to stop it.

What an uplifting conclusion for a film about an assassination. Milk could have been maudlin or hysterical, but it isn’t. It’s an inspiring reminder that the entire country was in the paddy wagons with those abused gay men, and we’re all here now in the streets, able to light a candle.