E-Mail This Article to a Friend Character Assassination From surfer dude to political hitman BY PETER KEOUGH

SEAN PENN WOULD probably disagree, but George W. Bush’s beating John Kerry may have been the best thing that could happen to his new movie, The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Look at the parallels between the early 1970s, when the film is set, and today. A Republican president, mired in an unwinnable war, pushing a right-wing agenda, enmeshed in secrecy and deceit, wins a second term after defeating a liberal Democratic candidate in a campaign riddled with dirty tricks. The Republicans claim a mandate; Democrats and progressives shrink into impotent rage. Who among the latter hasn’t harbored guilty fantasies of violent revolt?

Penn didn’t get mad; he made a movie. In first-time director Niels Mueller’s low-budget film, he plays Sam Bicke, a character inspired by the real-life Sam Byck, who, in a creepily prescient but largely forgotten footnote to history, plotted to assassinate then-president Richard Nixon in 1974. Sam is a loser, as liberals are today (he’s also a liberal). He’s separated from his wife and kids, he’s estranged from his older brother, he hates his job as a furniture salesman. Who’s to blame? Nixon’s the one. (See "Penn Pall," Arts and Entertainment, page 5.)

Some might see this film as a rip-off of the Travis Bickle story in Taxi Driver (this one, however, is true). Others, more kindly, might regard it in the tradition of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, another tale of the American dream disfigured by illusion, opacity, guilt, and despair. For Penn, though, it’s another in a long line of portraits of misfits and outsiders — some of whom make good, most of whom don’t — and their misadventures in a corrupt system to which they cannot or will not conform.

Start with Jeff Spicoli, the quintessential surfer dude and spaced-out anarchist of Penn’s breakout film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). For many it’s still the role for which he’s most remembered. Spicoli evolves into the druggie spy Daulton Lee in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), a fact-based story about two disaffected youths who rebel and make money by selling CIA secrets to the Soviets. Lee might be the role that most resembles Bicke, with his seedy little mustache, self-pity, and general ineptitude. The difference, perhaps, is idealism, another kind of addiction.

Leap forward a decade and the outlaw, antihero characters get very dark. As death-row inmate Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking (1995), Penn plays a killer seemingly without remorse or the capacity for self-awareness until Susan Sarandon’s Sister Helen Prejean finds the divine spark still within him. One of his more overtly political films, it does not so much decry capital punishment as illuminate the futility of revenge. The theme resembles that of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003), in which Penn plays a loser twisted by the death of his daughter into an avenger who perversely loses his soul while regaining his stature in the community.

Penn won an Oscar for Mystic River, restoring the screen presence dissipated over the years by problematic roles that had not resounded with the public. Nor did his directorial career add to his clout; the bleak and complex pictures The Indian Runner (1991), The Crossing Guard (1995), and The Pledge (2001) earned film-festival credentials but little box-office business, the latter two despite starring Penn’s pal Jack Nicholson.

In the tabloids, though, Penn’s notoriety has never diminished. His 1985 marriage to Madonna set off a media circus that his fury only intensified, leading to assaults on paparazzi and eventual incarceration. His eight-year marriage to Robin Wright Penn has mellowed him, or rather redirected his fury to the realm of politics. The war in Iraq inspired him to buy a full-page ad in the New York Times criticizing the president. He visited Baghdad both before and after Operation Iraqi Freedom and didn’t hesitate to talk about it. The right-wing media ate it up. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police caricatured him as a puppet of Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. On September 11, 2004, Bruce Springsteen presented him with the John Steinbeck Award for activist artists.

About a week before the November 2004 election, I spoke with Penn, who was in town showing The Assassination of Richard Nixon to a forum of local college students. I met him at the Jer-ne bar in the Ritz-Carlton, Boston Common, a much classier joint than those he haunts in any of his movies, but one still draped in noirish shadows. Penn is no longer the baby-faced Spicoli; his face has become one of the most magnificent in film, winnowed into a landscape of hollows and lines that might be embossed on a coin. He ordered a Coke and an ice tea, a caffeine fix to take the edge off his craving for the pack of American Spirits he clutched under the table.

"I quit for six months in 2000," he said. "It was because of a cell-phone conversation that I started again. I don’t think the cell phone has made the world a better place."

What will? Celebrity activists?

"I have a real problem with anyone not being an activist," Penn said gravely. "So I don’t have any thoughts specifically about celebrities doing so. One of the things about film, especially for those of us who spend any of our time investing ourselves in films we feel can have an impact, is that there is no hard proof that there is any impact and there’s no certainty that you can commit to about film being able to help things. And I think that when time and again people like Marlon [as a friend of Brando’s who is also considered the heir to his acting legacy, Penn was one of the few who attended his memorial service last July] do the kind of work that he did, and whereas it was often revered it was often dismissed. He committed so much of his heart to social causes, and it was so often attacked and dismissed and marginalized, that you say, ‘Well, what’s my purpose here? The world’s still in hell. And there’s all these people in enormous agony and fear and all these things, and what good has what I’ve done, done?’ You keep working for tomorrow, and there is a kind of innocent, childish optimism. But I think it’s the only one we’ve got. He was somebody who reintroduced it to himself many times and recovered it many times, but a lot of his life was spent in the disappointment of things not changing.

"Do you have kids?" asked Penn. He has two. "They make a huge difference. Especially where this is getting to be in my 40s now, and it’s a different arc of time that I’m looking back on, and I see how many things are not forever. When I was my kids’ age, the idea that there was some famous snowcapped mountain that you studied all your life and that snowcap was not going to be there in 10 years was impossible. When you heard about things changing, you thought of thousands of years from now. But things happen in lifetimes. Vietnam returns in a lifetime when it was once unthinkable. You start to have some experience with that cycle, and you imagine what your kids’ life will be. So you do want to see things evolve so that the cycle doesn’t just return again. But whether or not we’ll have an impact, I’ll probably be dead before I find out."

Such is the fate of his marionette likeness in Team America; a large tiger (actually a house cat) eats him. Does such vicious criticism of his outspokenness get to him?

"I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t speak to it. Generally speaking, I think that satire shouldn’t be attacked, so I don’t want to get into a ... I think that it’s a good thing and an important thing. Frankly, I’ve seen those guys do some things that are pretty funny, flipping channels. I think that this thing represents an immaturity and a final need to be liked by everybody, [which was] a kind of undoing, and I think the box office for that movie showed its undoing. Maybe with all their bravado, there will be a lesson in it. My son saw it, he thought it was funny. He’s 11."