I’ll confess something. I walked into this screening with low expectations and a mildly uncharitable attitude toward Rami Malek. Not because he’s a bad actor he isn’t but because somewhere between Mr. Robot and a string of films where he seemed to be playing “intensity” as a costume rather than a state of being, I’d quietly written him off as someone best used in small doses. Ira Sachs apparently didn’t get that memo. And watching The Man I Love unfold over its 95 minutes in a darkened Cannes screening room, I found myself doing something I genuinely didn’t expect to do.
I found myself believing every single second of him.
The film is set in downtown New York in the late 1980s that specific, irreplaceable world of experimental theater, loft parties, go-go bars, and artists making reckless, glorious things in rented spaces before any of them knew what was coming. Sachs knows this world.
You can feel it in the grain of Josée Deshaies’ film photography, in the wardrobe, in the casual way characters reference their work as though it’s both the most important thing in the universe and something that might fall apart by Tuesday. Nothing in the production design announces itself. It just is. That confidence that refusal to signal its own period detail is the mark of a filmmaker who doesn’t need to prove he did his research.
Jimmy George is a theater artist. Not a performance artist, he insists at one point, bristling slightly at the label — a distinction the film doesn’t explain and doesn’t need to, because you understand immediately what kind of person corrects that particular distinction. He’s the center of every room he enters. Magnetic, restless, a little selfish, endlessly compelling.
He’s also dying. Though nobody in the film says the word AIDS, or HIV, or anything clinical at all. They just move around it the way you move around a piece of furniture that’s been in the room so long you’ve stopped seeing it except it’s there, always, and you know where it is in the dark.
That silence is one of Sachs’ most deliberate and devastating choices. Because that’s how it actually was. People knew without saying. Friends showed up to dinner thinner than last month and everyone kept eating.
Tom Sturridge plays Dennis, Jimmy’s partner, and I want to spend a moment here because Dennis could easily disappear in the orbit of a character like Jimmy, and Sturridge simply doesn’t let that happen. He’s the quietest thing onscreen and somehow the most aching. There’s an early scene barely a scene, really, more of a breath where their arms reach across a dinner table and trace each other in that automatic, unconscious way that only happens when two people have been sharing a bed for years. Sturridge plays the whole film in that register.
Everything Dennis feels lives in the space between what he says and what he doesn’t. When Jimmy starts an affair with the young actor who’s just moved in downstairs Vincent, played with a kind of jittery, puppyish desire by Luther Ford Dennis doesn’t erupt. He just absorbs it. And that quiet absorption is somehow worse to watch than any argument could be.
Rebecca Hall arrives as Jimmy’s sister Brenda and does what Rebecca Hall does when she’s firing on all cylinders: she plays the truth of a scene even when the scene is asking her to hold something back. Brenda is the realist. The one who won’t pretend. There’s a dinner where the whole family sings one of those slightly chaotic, slightly theatrical family rituals that feels utterly lived-in and Hall performs a Finian’s Rainbow song with a grace that made the person sitting next to me in the screening exhale audibly. Ebon Moss-Bachrach as her husband Gene is quieter still, a steadying presence at the margins, but his eyes do a lot of work in the scenes where Jimmy is slowly, visibly coming undone.
And then there’s that scene. About two thirds in. Jimmy onstage for his opening night, and what should be a performance becomes something else entirely a man losing his grip on the thing that defines him, his memory slipping mid-show, his body failing in front of an audience that came to watch art and is instead watching something raw and private and not meant to be seen. I sat very still during that scene. The person next to me had stopped exhaling. Malek doesn’t play it for sympathy. He plays it for truth, which is braver and harder and the reason I’m still thinking about it now.
What Sachs consistently refuses to do and this is where he separates himself from the long tradition of AIDS films that want you to cry in the specific ways they’ve designed is turn any of this into a lesson. Jimmy is not a saint. He’s vain, he’s consuming, he pursues the young man downstairs knowing exactly what it costs Dennis, and the film doesn’t excuse that. It just shows it, with the same clear eyes it uses for everything else. The affair with Vincent is partly desire, partly creative hunger, partly just a man grabbing at something warm because the alternative is to sit still and feel what’s actually happening. You understand it even as you wince at it.
There’s a moment where Jimmy sits at a family gathering and sings a Melanie song “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma” with a small backup band. It shouldn’t work. It sounds like exactly the kind of quirky, whimsical scene that arthouse films sometimes plant to signal their own sensitivity. But Malek sings it like a man addressing a question he can’t stop asking, and whatever armor you’ve been keeping between yourself and this film quietly folds.
Not everything lands. Vincent remains slightly underfilled as a character, we understand what he represents to Jimmy more than who he actually is, and there are moments in the first act where Sachs’ discipline tips past restraint into something that briefly feels like withholding. A little more friction, a little earlier, wouldn’t have hurt.
But here’s the thing about Ira Sachs: he has spent his entire career making films about the complicated inner lives of people who love each other badly, well, insufficiently, and desperately, and The Man I Love feels like the work of someone who has finally found exactly the story he was always circling. It’s the late 1980s, it’s downtown New York, it’s the world that made him, and the grief in it, for all those artists and all that irreplaceable noise, is real and old and his.
You leave the film carrying Jimmy George with you. Not in any sentimental way. More the way you carry a song you heard once that you can’t name and can’t quite get rid of. He doesn’t want to go. The film keeps saying that, in every way except out loud. And by the end, sitting in the dark, neither did I.
Parental Guidance
Rating: Not yet officially rated, expected R in the United States. Equivalent to a 15 or 18 certificate in most international territories.
Violence & Intensity: No physical violence. The emotional weight, however, is significant and sustained. A late scene depicting a man visibly deteriorating during a live performance, losing memory, losing composure, losing himself in front of an audience, is genuinely distressing. The film handles serious illness and impending death without melodrama, which in some ways makes it harder to sit with, not easier.
Language: Moderate. Some strong language in naturalistic dialogue. No slurs. The overall tone is intimate rather than aggressive.
Sexual Content & Nudity: Frank and present. Sachs depicts queer sexuality and physical intimacy between adult men with honesty and without apology, as a shared language between characters rather than spectacle. Some nudity. Not gratuitous, but not shy either.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: A candid monologue in which Jimmy recounts a personal history involving sex and drugs. AZT and other AIDS-era medications are referenced naturally as part of daily life. Social drinking throughout. Period-appropriate smoking.
Age Recommendation: Adults only, 17 and over. This is a serious, emotionally demanding arthouse film. Not appropriate for children or young teenagers in any context. For older or mature teens with genuine interest in LGBTQ+ history or independent cinema, parental discretion and a prior conversation about the film’s themes would be strongly advised.