Rami Malek Stuns Cannes in Ira Sachs’ ‘The Man I Love’

Rami Malek has always been a polarizing figure in Hollywood — magnetic, a little mannered, occasionally too much. But in The Man I Love, Ira Sachs’ achingly observed portrait of art, desire, and mortality in late-1980s New York, all of that stops mattering. What Malek does here is something else entirely. It’s the kind of performance that resets the conversation.

The film had its world premiere Wednesday in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, walking the red carpet at the Grand Théâtre Lumière with co-stars Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — plus surprise attendees Demi Moore, Halsey, and Chloé Zhao there to witness what is already shaping up to be one of the year’s most talked-about films.

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Malek plays Jimmy George, a downtown Manhattan theater artist and founding member of a fictional experimental company called The Mechanicals. As the story opens, Jimmy has just survived a hospitalization for AIDS-related pneumonia — a brush with death that has, if anything, sharpened his hunger to create. He’s throwing himself into rehearsals for a new piece: a word-for-word stage recreation of a forgotten 1974 French-Canadian queer film called Once Upon a Time in the East, in which he’ll perform in drag as a blonde-wigged diva named Carmen. He is, in Sachs’ precise framing, a man living in the space between great illness and everything still possible.

That framing wasn’t accidental. Sachs and his longtime co-writer Mauricio Zacharias spent 15 years developing the story, drawing inspiration from Maurice Pialat’s film Van Gogh. “It’s about the last several months of Van Gogh’s life when his death was imminent,” Sachs explained in his director’s note. “But in that period, he lived and chose to live with such commitment to the creation of art, as well as the experience of pleasure. That was the kind of film Mauricio and I decided to write: one in which death is present, but in actuality, nobody actively dies; they actively live. What the film needed to be was the abundance, not the disappearance.”

The film shot over 28 days in New York, from September 21 to October 29, 2025. It is Sachs’ third feature in three years — following Passages and last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day — and arguably the most personal. Having moved to New York City around the time the movie is set, he is writing from lived memory, recreating the downtown alternative theater and performance scene with the specificity of someone who was actually there: the Wooster Group, the Pyramid Club, the drag acts and post-punk bands, the communal apartment gatherings where someone always ended up singing.

A Career-Best Performance — and a Supporting Cast That Matches It

What makes Malek’s work here so striking is how much he strips away. This is not the operatic commitment of Freddie Mercury, not the cold precision of his spy and detective roles. Jimmy George is languid and narcissistic and fiercely alive, a medium-sized exhibitionist in an oversize pond — an aging downtown party boy with real talent who doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Malek colors him with anger, tenderness, psychosis, and a morose charisma that makes the room bend toward him without him even trying. He plays Jimmy as a man caught between liberation and AIDS, between wanting to break out and staying true to his subversive drag soul.

The performance has a particular emotional peak that critics are already singling out: a scene at his parents’ anniversary party — one Dennis, his long-term boyfriend, wasn’t invited to — where Jimmy sits before a backup band and sings Melanie’s 1970 folk-pop hit “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.” It’s a song that reads as slight on paper. In Malek’s hands, according to Variety, “he charges it with the sadness and defiance of a lifetime.” The world, the scene suggests, has stopped hearing Jimmy’s song. Here, it rings out like something irreplaceable.

As Jimmy’s devoted partner Dennis, Tom Sturridge is the film’s quiet revelation. Dennis manages Jimmy’s medications, makes sure he eats, organizes his life — and does it all while slowly registering the hurt of watching his partner begin a charged affair with Vincent (Luther Ford), the attractive young British man who’s just moved in downstairs. Sturridge doesn’t traffic in big emotional displays. He works in flickers — a tightening around the eyes, a studied stillness. One scene at the hospital, played with raw exposed nerves, has been described as genuinely crushing.

Ford, meanwhile, makes an impressive feature debut — particularly notable given his previous work as the young Prince Harry in The Crown. Vincent is jittery, hormonally alive, freshly out of the closet and not yet equipped to understand that he’s being used as a muse. When Dennis confronts him about the affair, Vincent’s defense lands like a gut punch: “He’s an artist, he wants to have inspiration. He wants to fall in love with me!” Dennis, who has watched his partner nearly die, has no answer for that.

Rebecca Hall, reuniting with Sachs after Peter Hujar’s Day, brings deep feeling to Jimmy’s sister Brenda — the realist in the room, the one who refuses to pretend the clock isn’t running. A scene where Sachs takes the siblings to a fabulous drag bar, set to Shirley Ellis’ “Clapping Song,” is pure joy — cinematographer Josée Deshaies getting in close to drag queens in thrift-store glamour shaking their asses with total self-celebratory abandon. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Brenda’s husband Gene with quiet, pragmatic kindness, gently reminding his wife that Jimmy’s current vitality won’t hold. Also along for the visit: their preteen son Billy (Dennis Courtis), who adores his uncle, and who becomes the unlikely audience for one of the film’s funniest and most heartbreaking scenes — a confessional video message to his grandparents that starts as a tribute and spirals, in exquisite detail, into a full accounting of Jimmy’s history with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Gene cannot get his son out of that room fast enough.

Not an AIDS Movie You’ve Seen Before

What Sachs has made, critics agree, is emphatically not the AIDS film you’re bracing for. There are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, no tearful bedside vigils as set pieces, no disease-of-the-week emotional beats. The film’s single hospital scene focuses entirely on Dennis — on what he’s experiencing, not what Jimmy is losing. The approach is less about dying than about the ferocious, almost defiant insistence on living: on rehearsal, on parties, on desire, on singing one more song.

The movie is also, in its own way, a time capsule. Sachs recreates the downtown New York arts scene of the late ’80s with the same specificity he brought to the mid-’70s in Peter Hujar’s Day — a window between peak Andy Warhol and Keith Haring giving way to the generation that followed. The needle drops are impeccable throughout, building to a closing song choice that may be the year’s most devastating outro: Ronee Blakley’s “Lightning Over Water,” from the 1980 film co-directed by Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray. It’s a track that builds from a beat-poem spoken-word opening to a full-force crescendo where Blakley sounds, as one critic put it, like Patti Smith and Grace Slick rolled into one. A song about clutching onto one life with everything you have, refusing to let go for as long as possible.

The Man I Love is currently seeking U.S. distribution. If there’s any justice, it won’t be waiting long.