(Check out Savina Petkova’s The Man I Love movie review. The film just had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Ira Sachs doesn’t make films for the audience, he gifts them. After the heart-wrenching love triangle of Passages (2023) and the more modest two-hander that was Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), the bard of unfortified masculinity expands his scope to a triptych of characters. The Man I Love may be in the singular, but the film, centered around Rami Malek’s fallible, but at times exquisite performance as Jimmy George – a magnetic artist between two men and between fame and death. Set in New York in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis, The Man I Love is also a love letter to those who lost the fatal battle, from Sachs and his regular collaborator Mauricio Zacharias.
Jimmy is somewhat of a legend in downtown New York, his vivacious presence inspiring awe and a little bit of worry in those around him. “He looks better,” someone comments in passing, and the concerned looks of his sister Brenda (Rebecca Hall) are the kind you give a sick child. Instead of focusing on the characters’ anticipatory grief—because even if Jimmy’s recovered from pneumonia, we suspect the row of pills and supplements he takes won’t ultimately save him—Sachs structures the film around glimpses of joy and the promise of love. The filmmaker takes a cue from Maurice Pialat’s 1991 film Van Gogh to imbue the narrative with pleasure and to defer the inevitable end, but the task falls less on Jimmy, than on those around him.
It’s mostly Dennis (Tom Sturridge from The Sandman TV series), Jimmy’s long-term partner, who looks after him with seemingly endless patience and adoration, equally supportive of his new stage role as he is of nighttime escapades: calm and loving, a safe harbour. This kind of compliance can demote a character to near invisibility, but as the narrative unfolds, Dennis emerges as its most intriguing, complex character – not a mirror, nor a sidekick, but a custodian of love. One spectacular scene shows Jimmy perform the titular song by George Gershwin in a bar to a rapt audience, but a triangulation is at play. As he sings the chorus, the shot cuts between Jimmy, Dennis, and their new downstairs neighbor – Vincent (a seemingly clueless Luther Ford), in a gesture that establishes the tensions of the film’s second half. Leave it to editor extraordinaire Affonso Gonçalves to craft a flow of transitions so delicate they can pierce your heart.
Another reason this sequence holds so much power over the viewer is the camerawork by Passages DoP Josée Deshaies, whose work with Bertrand Bonello carries over in The Man I Love with a heightened sensitivity towards the ineffable. Even though characters talk—and Jimmy sings—about themselves and their feelings, the camera encourages them to show, not tell. A technique that works remarkably well throughout is the slow, intentionally obtrusive zoom as an equivalent to the mesmerized audience perspective. In those instances, Rami Malek embodies the role to the degree of perfection – his face twitching ever so-slightly in response to the cheering crowd, he radiates devotion to the stage. This, however, is also the pitfall of his casting: that he is perhaps too self-conscious as an actor in the role of an actor performing, so that every micro-movement and gesture looks too polished, calibrated with the right amount of camp to assure his acting overpowers the character.
There’s also much frailty to Jimmy, and channeling this specific kind of vulnerability under the spotlight is maybe too subtle for the Oscar-winning actor. In some of the film’s most crucial (and heartbreakingly beautiful) scenes when his character is at his most fallible, Malek simply refuses to crack, instead elevating his performative weakness to an alienating artform. If it was solely up to his role, The Man I Love would not be half as moving as it is. The film succeeds thanks to the characters placed in Jimmy’s periphery. This communicates a vital conviction shared by Ira Sachs’ and his films: the people who love you will be there for you, no matter what.
– Savina Petkova (@SavinaPetkova)
