{"id":683058,"date":"2026-05-21T00:27:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T00:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/683058\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T00:27:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T00:27:16","slug":"the-man-i-love-review-rami-malek-in-ira-sachs-aids-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/683058\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Man I Love’ Review: Rami Malek in Ira Sachs’ AIDS Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ira Sachs<\/a> directs Rami Malek in the melancholy, sexy, and piercingly sad \u201cThe Man I Love<\/a>,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

Malek plays a New York performance artist named Jimmy George in the 1980s, who has an affair with the cute ginger twink who\u2019s 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\u2019s sarcoma lesions on display, or tearful bedside vigils, and there\u2019s only one scene in a hospital that\u2019s instead focused entirely on Jimmy\u2019s partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and how he reacts to his boyfriend\u2019s worsening and critical condition.<\/p>\n

\"Daril<\/a> \"Ask<\/a> <\/p>\n

Sachs, co-writing the film<\/a> 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\u2019s immersiveness. The \u201cKeep the Lights on\u201d and \u201cPeter Hujar\u2019s Day<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019ve looked like. <\/p>\n

Jimmy\u2019s 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, \u201cThe Man I Love\u201d delivers in terms of a destructive and heartbroken romantic pas de trois \u00e0 la Sachs\u2019 devastating, darkly funny 2023 film \u201cPassages<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a showcase for a more inward-facing turn from the Oscar-winning actor who played the outr\u00e9 and ultra-flamboyant Freddie Mercury in \u201cBohemian Rhapsody.\u201d In the beautiful bummer that is \u201cThe Man I Love,\u201d 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 \u2014 and also so that Dennis doesn\u2019t have to actually reckon with himself. There\u2019s 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\u2019s implied Vincent\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Dennis is cautious and defensive toward Vincent about the pair\u2019s growing attraction. He also understands, as conveyed by Sturridge\u2019s 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\u2019 anniversary party that Dennis wasn\u2019t invited to. Vincent pursues Jimmy like a homing missile, but the young man is jittery and restless in his own skin up against Jimmy\u2019s shameless self-assuredness. When Dennis basically attacks him, trying to interfere with their relationship, Vincent screams back, \u201cHe\u2019s an artist, he wants to have inspiration. He wants to fall in love with me!\u201d<\/p>\n

Dennis earlier said, \u201cI hope you\u2019re being careful,\u201d indicating it\u2019s not his first time on the ride that is his boyfriend\u2019s wanderlust. But it may be the last. Vincent, meanwhile, is too green, too inexperienced in matters of love, to recognize that he\u2019s being used as a muse, even though his erotic spark with Jimmy is real.<\/p>\n

Rebecca Hall, who was gorgeously filmed and costumed as the writer Linda Rosenkrantz in Sachs\u2019 girl-and-a-gay two-hander \u201cPeter Hujar\u2019s Day<\/a>,\u201d and Ebon Moss-Bachrach make appearances as Jimmy\u2019s sister and brother-in-law. They know the score that Jimmy is on borrowed time, and while they\u2019re not overtly homophobic, they\u2019re 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\u2019s \u201clifestyle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or is it just discomfort with someone so terminally set on vacuuming up other people\u2019s attention, whose hallowed orbit ends up blotting you out from view?<\/p>\n

Malek\u2019s 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 \u201cOppenheimer\u201d and \u201cNo Time to Die\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t especially feel like seeing it acted out again after so many clunky, stop-and-start rehearsals.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cCruising\u201d-esque glow of midnight blue by cinematographer Jos\u00e9e 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Whether \u201cLittle Men\u201d or \u201cLove Is Strange,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Grade: B+<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Man I Love\u201d premiered at the 2026 Cannes<\/a> Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ira Sachs directs Rami Malek in the melancholy, sexy, and piercingly sad \u201cThe Man I Love,\u201d which is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,43877,75,28908,1554,230620,337,209,250542],"class_list":["post-683058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-film","tag-ira-sachs","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-the-man-i-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}