‘The Man I Love’ Cannes Review: Ira Sachs Finds Beauty And Resilience In The Shadow Of The AIDS Crisis

Pitched at a register close to that of Peter Hujar’s Day — a film that moved inside the home of a gay photographer in 1970s New York to document the textures of his daily life — Ira Sachs returns to a similar moment in time and place to tell another story rooted in the city’s artistic world. The Man I Love unfolds at an unspecified point in the 1980s, when AIDS was still a death sentence and the medications available didn’t always deliver.

Within this tight microcosm, we follow Jimmy George (Rami Malek, a shade less mannered than usual), a celebrated actor and singer in New York theater circles who is deep in rehearsals for a new production. The show requires him to reproduce — nearly word for word — the rehearsals from a scene in the 1974 Canadian film Il Était une Fois Dans l’Est, in which a singer named Carmen clashes with her musicians. In its first half at least, the film plants itself squarely inside those rehearsals — the false starts, the effort to internalize a character both mentally and physically — and inside the artistic community that cycles through Jimmy’s apartment to sing and drink.

Jimmy appears physically intact, or close enough. But he has AIDS and came close to death only months earlier. The work helps him stay grounded. Around him orbit his partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge), his sister (Rebecca Hall), his brother-in-law (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, underused), and an ensemble of actors, singers, and crew preparing the production. Into this world steps the downstairs neighbor, a newly arrived young man named Vincent (Luther Ford), who sets his sights on Jimmy and will not stop until he gets what he wants — indifferent to Jimmy’s illness and to his own wellbeing.

The universe Sachs depicts — the director of Passages working once again in intimate register — is small and specific: a portrait of a gay New York gutted by AIDS. But within that world, spirits hold. The prevailing sense this warm human ensemble gives off is that the best response to looming catastrophe is proximity — being together, staying close, showing up. And singing, above all. The film’s finest scene has several of them passing an imaginary microphone around, each picking up a fragment of a love song or a show tune, weaving something communal out of borrowed melodies.

Harmony isn’t always possible — there are rivalries, friction, sharp edges — but a spirit of generosity governs both the film and, as a rule, Sachs’ cinema. The tensions that surface have to do with family dynamics, with Jimmy’s difficulty memorizing his lines, and most pointedly with the intrusive presence of Vincent, who unsettles Dennis — not out of jealousy, but out of an acute awareness of just how fragile his partner really is.

Malek is an actor who provokes strong feelings in either direction, but here he is very good, channeling his habitual excess of facial tics into a glamorous protagonist whose own theatrical personality gives the actor room to breathe — and, paradoxically, to be more restrained than usual. Beyond the performance’s surface, there is a persistent melancholy weighing on Jimmy that pushes Malek into genuinely moving territory. And the actors surrounding him throw themselves fully into making Jimmy’s experience warmer, more bearable, more livable than it might otherwise be.

In social gatherings and private encounters, in rehearsals, in bed, at work, the characters of The Man I Love project a kind of truth that is hard to manufacture or write. Sachs has a precise ear for the feeling of impermanence and fragility that defines Jimmy’s life — as it defined the lives of so many who lived through that epidemic, people who could sense the clock running and chose, nonetheless, to meet it head-on. And he has just as precise an eye for the community that surrounds such people: ready to give everything to walk alongside them, for however long the walk lasts.