Ira Sachs directs Rami Malek in the melancholy, sexy, and piercingly sad “The Man I Love,” which is elusive to think about and to hold in your hand but nonetheless makes a scarring impression because of how it shirks the cliches related to the AIDS movie genre.
Malek plays a New York performance artist named Jimmy George in the 1980s, who has an affair with the cute ginger twink who’s just moved in downstairs as a sort of last grab at joie de vivre before the disease inevitably takes him down. There are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on display, or tearful bedside vigils, and there’s only one scene in a hospital that’s instead focused entirely on Jimmy’s partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and how he reacts to his boyfriend’s worsening and critical condition.
Sachs, co-writing the film per usual with Mauricio Zacharias, has a deep investment in the Manhattan arts scene of the period that pays off in terms of the drama’s immersiveness. The “Keep the Lights on” and “Peter Hujar’s Day” director makes period films that you can feel and touch, almost like stepping into an imagined dream of what that particular time in the past might’ve looked like.
Jimmy’s identity as a stage performer is less than fully rounded as he stages a drag theater piece, whose origins and specifics are murkily assembled. We understand this will likely be his curtain call as AIDS finally starts to kill him. Ambiguity aside, “The Man I Love” delivers in terms of a destructive and heartbroken romantic pas de trois à la Sachs’ devastating, darkly funny 2023 film “Passages.”
It’s also a showcase for a more inward-facing turn from the Oscar-winning actor who played the outré and ultra-flamboyant Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the beautiful bummer that is “The Man I Love,” Dennis takes care of his boyfriend Jimmy in doling out the needed AZT and other pills and vitamins so that his partner can throw himself into his art — and also so that Dennis doesn’t have to actually reckon with himself. There’s passion between them, but Jimmy becomes greatly distracted when the fetching Vincent (Luther Ford, all nervy hormones, freshly-out-of-the-closet febrility, and horny yearning) moves into the apartment downstairs, where it’s implied Vincent’s predecessor killed himself amid the bad end of an AIDS prognosis. Jimmy is immediately struck by this younger, virile, needier man when Vincent asks him to help move a piece of furniture in.
Meanwhile, Dennis is cautious and defensive toward Vincent about the pair’s growing attraction. He also understands, as conveyed by Sturridge’s taciturn and all-quiet-pain performance, that Jimmy is a magnet capable of sucking up all the air in the room and drawing all eyes toward him, including when Jimmy sings a song and plays guitar at his parents’ anniversary party that Dennis wasn’t invited to. Vincent pursues Jimmy like a homing missile, but the young man is jittery and restless in his own skin up against Jimmy’s shameless self-assuredness. When Dennis basically attacks him, trying to interfere with their relationship, Vincent screams back, “He’s an artist, he wants to have inspiration. He wants to fall in love with me!”
Dennis earlier said, “I hope you’re being careful,” indicating it’s not his first time on the ride that is his boyfriend’s wanderlust. But it may be the last. Vincent, meanwhile, is too green, too inexperienced in matters of love, to recognize that he’s being used as a muse, even though his erotic spark with Jimmy is real.
Rebecca Hall, who was gorgeously filmed and costumed as the writer Linda Rosenkrantz in Sachs’ girl-and-a-gay two-hander “Peter Hujar’s Day,” and Ebon Moss-Bachrach make appearances as Jimmy’s sister and brother-in-law. They know the score that Jimmy is on borrowed time, and while they’re not overtly homophobic, they’re a bit estranged from his personal life. A woundingly funny scene in which Moss-Bachrach walks in on Jimmy oversharing to his nephew very personal details about his hard-going ways of sex and drug use reveals that there is some discomfort toward Jimmy’s “lifestyle.”
Or is it just discomfort with someone so terminally set on vacuuming up other people’s attention, whose hallowed orbit ends up blotting you out from view?
Malek’s performance is probably the most affecting of his career, a career often built on ostentatiousness and proverbially singing to the back of the room, though the “Oppenheimer” and “No Time to Die” star, who has not featured prominently in an independent movie in some years, at times appears to be acting rather than dissolving into the part. An AIDS-related neurological fit he has onstage as he’s about to begin the long-awaited and long-fussed-over performance piece comes as a relief because, by that point, the audience is exhausted by the play itself and doesn’t especially feel like seeing it acted out again after so many clunky, stop-and-start rehearsals.
The actors who especially come out on top here are Sturridge and Ford as the dueling counterpoints in this ruinous romantic triangle. There is a great sequence, shot in a “Cruising”-esque glow of midnight blue by cinematographer Josée Deshaies, in which Vincent follows Jimmy to a club and all but accosts him on the dance floor, ripping off his shirt and writhing with a possibly drugged-out but definitely mentally lost-in-space Jimmy, whose symptoms are taking hold. Vincent fucks him next to the toilet, hopefully making him less likely to contract the disease if he tops. Vincent doesn’t seem to care that Jimmy is infected, or that worried that he could become so, too. Dennis is meanwhile back at home, probably glowering, knowing again how this story ends.
It’s admirable and even exhilaratingly rebellious how much Sachs, from film to film, seems disinterested in expanding his audience. He is one of the only American filmmakers of a certain profile who is putting gay stories onscreen with a frank emotional honesty and richly literate curiosity about film history, which he pours into every frame. Here is an urbane, erudite artist who makes his cast watch Maurice Pialat films before they head into production.
Whether “Little Men” or “Love Is Strange,” movies that have courted the mainstream not only because of their Hollywood-prominent actors but also because of their universal emotional themes, Sachs recognizes that his audience is a niche one. This movie will hurt you.
Grade: B+
“The Man I Love” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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