In Ira Sachs’ last film, Peter Hujar’s Day, the director used a rigorous framing device––a purposefully banal interview that took place in 1974 between the eponymous New York photographer and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz––as a way of opening a window onto Hujar’s life and creative process. The director returns to Cannes with The Man I Love, another sketched portrait, though this time of a fictional figure of that same New York queer scene, and set a decade or so later at the height of the AIDS epidemic. This time, Sachs widens his lens to take in the friends, lovers, and hangers-on who populated the last few weeks of the life of Jimmy George (Rami Malek) in the lead-up to his final performance. The period accuracy here is even more immersive and lovingly crafted than what Sachs achieved in his previous work, but it never quite captures its subject with the same level of detail.
Naturally, the two films would make for a recommended double feature, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sachs decides to cap it off as a trilogy. Having moved to New York as a young filmmaker in 1989, it’s a world that he’s continually explored and in a variety of different ways: first in his non-fiction short Last Address, which showed the exterior facades of the buildings where artists like Hujar, who died of complications relating to HIV, lived, and again with his breakout feature, Keep the Lights On, which focused on a New York couple living in the shadow of the epidemic’s worst years. The Man I Love is his first narrative feature that’s directly focused on that era, and while it’s a milieu the film evokes in great detail, something in the performances holds it back.
Over the years, Sachs has directed as wide-ranging actors as Alfred Molina and John Lithgow (Love Is Strange), Franz Rogowski (Passages), and Paulina García (Little Men) to nominations at the Indie Spirit Awards, but with Malek in the lead here, the director doesn’t quite locate the same magic. Jimmy George (presumably a composite character of various denizens of the queer theater scene) struts his stuff convincingly on two notable occasions––first as entertainment for a crowd that’s gathered to celebrate him surviving a close scare (thanks to an early version of AZT) and the second at a local bar, where he provides a musical performance brimming with gentle eroticism––yet the performance can’t quite escape the long shadow of the actor’s Oscar-winning, still-controversial turn as Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. There are times when the film convinces us of Jimmy’s gravitational pull on the world around him, but it is too often undercut by a strange lack of chemistry between co-stars––namely Tom Sturridge, who plays his live-in partner, and Luther Ford, as a younger British man who’s traveled to New York to meet him.
If you’re willing to forgive a stilted atmosphere in some of those sequences, Sachs’ passion for the period is as affecting as it is undimmed. The film luxuriates in it with a soundtrack including Talking Heads and Ronee Blakley, and there are some gorgeously realized scenes in the bar where Jimmy sings, as well as one remarkable sequence in a steamy sex club that splits the difference between dreamy nostalgia and gritty realism. There is also a welcome return for Rebecca Hall after her wonderful performance in Peter Hujar’s Day––she plays Jimmy’s sister, Brenda, while Ebon Moss-Bachrach portrays his brother-in-law. They make for an interesting couple, and the film would have benefited from giving them a little more time.
When all of those things are taken away, as happens more often than not, we are left only to consider the central performance. Although Malek certainly looks the part and is costumed beautifully throughout, I doubt it will be a turn that wins back detractors. For Sachs, it’s a relatively strong directorial return to Cannes after the disappointment of Frankie in 2019. The Man I Love is not the “musical” that promotional materials have suggested, but it’s more than worth seeing just the same.
The Man I Love premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.