Creating a film about queer people in New York City during the 1980s means telling a story laden with loss, but chock-full of personality. In the words of Dan Savage, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
Exploration and celebration of the lives that were lost during the AIDS pandemic make for artful storytelling: a setting not overly wrought with heaviness, but full of depth to chew on. Humor and visual beauty. Earned emotions from raw tragedy. Romance, resilience, fabulousness. Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love builds a world that warms your heart with these bittersweet tools.
The film premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival last week. It follows Jimmy George (Rami Malek), a performance artist living with AIDS in New York during the ‘80s. This follows my favorite film from last year’s festival, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025), directed by Diego Céspedes, which is set in a Chilean mining village during the AIDS crisis. In that film, there is a rumor going around town that if you look in the eyes of the queer members of town, you will catch the circulating plague. The Man I Love, while more direct about the sickness, shares the same strengths as films like Flamingo and Rent (2005): fierce protagonists that remind you of the perseverance, hilarity, and uniqueness of the LGBTQ+ community, even in the face of an oppressive public health crisis.
Although Jimmy is the central character, the film first introduces us to his partner, Dennis (Tom Sturridge), a quiet, caring lover with whom he lives. He meets the new downstairs neighbor, Vincent (Luther Ford), an eager Englishman, and shares that he lives with Jimmy upstairs.
We see the two triangulated secondary characters face one another, but Jimmy’s first scenes show him alone, deep in his script, or watching clips from a French film he’s adapting for the stage. The film explores what it means to be in love, or to love being loved. Dennis loyally tends to Jimmy, regardless of his sporadic, difficult behaviors. But Vincent quickly falls for Jimmy. It’s not as romantic; it feels fleeting and immature, with hot and heavy hookups devoid of connection. The two are caught in Jimmy’s orbit, who doesn’t seem to reciprocate as much infatuation for either. His energy and affections are focused on his theatrical work.
Vincent represents naive indulgence. Every scene features him fetching beers, offering bottles of wine, asking to go for ice cream, or bringing pizzas to share. When Dennis tries to knock some sense into him, Vincent says, “Jimmy wants to fall in love. He’s an artist, he wants inspiration, he wants to fall in love with me.” It comes across like a childish wish, not a proclamation of his own true attachment.
Dennis exhibits more weathered depth. He’s intimate with Jimmy during the hard times. He cares for him in sweet ways: cooking his meals, bathing him, and assembling his pills for the week. Jimmy doesn’t seem to let either of them in with any real vulnerability or passion.
When Jimmy sings “The Man I Love” at a drag cabaret, we don’t see him making devoted eye contact with either of his lovers. But rather, both gaze at him, enchanted, while he performs for the audience. He’s an actor, seemingly more in love with his play than either of the men enamored with him.
The song longs for a day when the man the singer loves will come along. The lyrics say, “He’ll build a little home, just meant for two. From which I’ll never roam. Who would? Would you?” The infidelity that follows contradicts this, in the same way that the notion of someday meeting a man he loves makes little sense at this moment, since he and Dennis have been content together for years.
On a YouTube video of Ella Fitzgerald’s iteration of the song, a comment by @josepedr0.05 sums it up well: “I love the type of sadness this has, like a false hope…” As the title of the film suggests, it seems that writers Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias sensed that as well, and used the song’s tone as a catalyst to tell Jimmy’s story.
The film balances heaviness with joy and beauty. We don’t see Jimmy suffer much. His family and friends have clearly been through hard times with him, and you can tell they’re hoping he maintains his health, but they know it could take a turn for the worse. There are no heavy hospital deathbed scenes or tear-stained faces at funerals. It’s a movie more emblematic of the artistry from that time period that we’ve lost, but survivors remember. An exploration of love and longing. An appreciation of queer creativity and individuality.
A contrasting example of less tactile storytelling would be Boys Don’t Cry (1999), a film about a trans man, full of excessive sexual violence and trauma. There can be a place to convey historic hardship, but there is a fine line between an antagonist enacting aggression versus a filmmaker, and therefore the audience, becoming the ones to revel in harming the character onscreen.
Controversially, Malek and Sturridge are both straight men playing gay roles. When Variety asked Sachs about this choice, he stated, “I don’t ask people who they’ve slept with, and what I have found out is you never know.” This is an ongoing cultural conversation in which many queer folks wish for queer roles to be given to members of the LGBTQ+ community. However, the counterintuitive result is the policing of people’s private lives and the reinforcement of the very boxes and restrictions that queerness is meant to deconstruct.
In that same Variety interview, Sachs shared that as a gay man, he primarily makes movies about gay men. He expressed that The Man I Love is “a film that’s a testament to creativity as a form of survival. Art and art-making are so vital to life and to breathing. In that way, I connect very much to Jimmy.” His choice of Malek as the lead came from watching his “natural, easy kind of acting” in Mr. Robot (2015-2019). “Rami is a star, and he has something magnetic that allows him to hold a movie together.” The performances in the film uphold Sachs’ successful casting decisions.
To support the love within it, the film exists in pastel colors. Pale pink appears in the outfits and decor of several scenes. The operatic score and bittersweet group serenade party scene weave music throughout a story about someone who finds life in singing.
From Fashion designer Halston to “disco doorman” Haoui Montaug, the list of inspiring individuals gone too soon from a stigmatized sickness is long. Author of Frog and Toad, Arnold Lobel passed away in 1987 after suffering from AIDS, with his children’s books left behind as subtle queer love stories. Another relevant example, as Malek played him in the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), is Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991.
Sachs presents an affectionate vignette and an ode to special people like these in The Man I Love. It earned a 10-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, and its wider public release date is to be determined. When it does hit theaters, it’s worth watching.
Review Courtesy of Risa Bolash
Feature Image Credit to Jac Martinez