Rami Malek Burns Brighter Than He Has in Years in The Man I Love

Ira Sachs has an expansive appreciation for male beauty that serves Rami Malek well in The Man I Love. Malek, with his strong jaw and nocturnal animal’s eyes, has an arresting face that Hollywood has tended, in the stretch since his breakout role in Mr. Robot to his ascension to Oscar-winning movie star, to treat as interesting rather than handsome. But in Sachs’s latest film, which just premiered at Cannes, Malek plays someone who’s accustomed to being desired and also to, in a more general sense, drawing everyone’s eyes his way when he enters a room. His character, Jimmy George, is an actor and performance artist of a particular type of downtown renown. His brother-in-law Gene (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), while accompanying Jimmy’s sister, Brenda (Rebecca Hall), and their son, Billy (Dennis Courtis), on a visit to New York, privately describes Jimmy as lazy, saying that he’s talented enough to have gone to L.A. to make “real movies.” Jimmy, though, is clearly where he wants to be. His theater group the Mechanicals is preparing a stage adaptation of a 1974 French-Canadian film called Once Upon a Time in the East, in which Jimmy will play a brassy singer named Carmen — a clear indication that commercial success is not one of its top priorities.

The Man I Love is about a man who refuses to let the fact that he’s dying stop him from making art and about a thriving late-’80s queer scene that similarly refuses to be cowed by the AIDS epidemic decimating its population. More than either, it’s about being with someone who barely has room in their life for you, a theme that Sachs has returned to in different iterations over the years, from the chaotic love triangle in Passages to Keep the Lights On’s chronicle of a yearslong relationship with a man with addiction issues. Jimmy’s own long-term lover is a quiet man named Dennis (Tom Sturridge) who’s been caring for him steadily through his health ups and downs, including a recent bout of AIDS-related pneumonia that sent him to the hospital and almost killed him. As a reward to Dennis for his steadfastness, the recovered Jimmy takes up with a young man who moves in downstairs, a milk-pale Brit named Vincent (Luther Ford), who’s new to everything and who doesn’t just fall into instant lust with his neighbor but insists with a boyish fervor that theirs is a fairy-tale romance. In search of his obsession, he bangs on the door of their apartment, and when he finds only Dennis there, he tells the man that “Jimmy wants to fall in love with me — he’s an artist! He needs inspiration!”

A more conventional film would be centered on Vincent, who crashes into the established lives of these two men, who falls in love and gets his heart shattered, and who emerges a little wiser and less innocent to join the sea of other gay men on the dance floor. A better one might have been centered on Dennis and on the complicated mixture of admiration and ruefulness with which Sachs seems to regard relationships like theirs, on what it means to commit yourself to someone who needs you but who’s forever slipping out of reach. But The Man I Love is centered on Jimmy, a character who is in the process of burning brighter right before his flame goes out forever. Jimmy is a compulsively magnetic figure who keeps everyone at arm’s length, including the audience, and for a film that embodies a voluptuous sense of tragedy, that leaves it undeniably aloof. The script, which Sachs co-wrote with his regular collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, has no interest in overexplaining its milieu or serving as an anthropological missive from the past, which is admirable. Yet it doesn’t extend a hand in any other way at all, whether it’s to set up a scene in which Jimmy reenacts a hilariously profane Curt McDowell short for his nephew to record or to give us insight into what Jimmy and Dennis’s lives were like before the hospitalization.

Its only concession comes from the presence of Hall, who starred in Sachs’s brilliant 2025 film, Peter Hujar’s Day. Her Brenda loves her brother fiercely and says out loud all the things the other characters refuse to. Malek is entrancing in the film, managing something that his studied performance as Freddie Mercury never did, which is to convince you that his character has the volcanic charisma of a star before ever stepping onstage — which he does, here, too, albeit on a much smaller scale than Wembley Stadium. But his Jimmy is a performance of a performance, someone who’s always on, whether as a matter of practice or as a protective measure as mortality looms closer. It feels strange to describe the film this way, even as it treats its main character with such tenderness over the tumultuous last months of his life. But for all its grandeur and sadness, The Man I Love is cooler to the touch than Sachs’s last film, a semi-experimental re-creation of a conversation between two friends about minutiae.