• Rami Malek’s new Cannes film The Man I Love earned an eight-minute standing ovation at its world premiere — and Malek cried through it.
• Malek initially feared the role was too similar to his Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury performance in Bohemian Rhapsody.
• Director Ira Sachs’ film is one of only two American features competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2026.
• The film co-stars Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and newcomer Luther Ford — with MUBI holding international rights and U.S. distribution still up for grabs.
• Critics are already calling it Malek’s best performance since Bohemian Rhapsody, with early Oscar buzz building fast.

Rami Malek stood in the Palais at Cannes on Wednesday night, tears running down his face, soaking in eight minutes of sustained applause for The Man I Love — and if you know anything about what it took him to get there, those tears make complete sense.

Before he ever said yes to director Ira Sachs’ deeply moving AIDS-era drama, Malek almost walked away from it entirely. The role hit too close to home. “I can’t do this, there’s too many similarities,” he said after reading the script. His concern was obvious: he’d already won a Best Actor Oscar playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, a performer who also died of AIDS. Now here was another role — a singer and performer battling the same disease, in the same era. “It could be problematic,” he admitted. “There was a certain sense of fear.”

But he didn’t walk away. He ran toward it.

“If there was anything that Freddie taught me it was to address the fear,” Malek said. “If there’s anything I learned from Ira is that he makes unique cinema unlike any other, and I knew I was in extraordinary hands. If he was choosing me, I could rely on him, not only to depend on him throughout the film, but to elevate it, to push myself, to force myself to race into that fire. When I raced into it, I started to discover that these were men who were similar, but they were also worlds apart.”

Who Is Jimmy George?

In The Man I Love, Malek plays Jimmy George, a fictional Downtown New York performance artist in the late 1980s who has just survived a three-week hospital stay following AIDS-related pneumonia. He’s back on his feet — barely — and his response to staring down death is to create. He throws himself into staging a theater piece loosely inspired by André Brassard’s 1974 French-Canadian queer film Once Upon a Time in the East, playing a defiant female character named Hélène who sings with a band. He sings at his parents’ anniversary party. He picks up a new lover — Vincent (Luther Ford), a younger man who’s just moved into the apartment downstairs — even as his devoted partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge, genuinely terrific) holds everything together at home.

The film was co-written by Sachs and his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, and it’s set against the backdrop of Reagan-era America — a period of reactionary homophobia at its ugliest. But Sachs isn’t interested in making a film about suffering for suffering’s sake. Jimmy’s story is about the hunger to live, to create, to love one more time, even when the clock is running out.

Rebecca Hall and Ebon Moss-Bachrach round out the cast as Jimmy’s sister and brother-in-law, and there’s a woundingly funny scene where Moss-Bachrach walks in on Jimmy oversharing some extremely personal details about his sex life to his nephew — a moment that captures, without any speechifying, the quiet estrangement between Jimmy and his family.

What the Critics Are Saying

The reviews out of Cannes suggest Malek has delivered something that will be very hard to ignore come awards season. Variety called it his best role since Bohemian Rhapsody, writing that the performance is built on “shades of anger, tenderness, psychosis, and the sheer pesky individuality of Jimmy” — and singled out one particular scene as the film’s emotional highlight: Malek sitting in front of a backup band at his parents’ anniversary party, singing the 1970 Melanie hit “What Have They Done to My Song Ma.” The way he delivers it, according to Variety, “he charges it with the sadness and defiance of a lifetime.”

The Wrap went even further, declaring that Bohemian Rhapsody “was just the opening act for his vocal work here” — pointing to a sorrowful cover of “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” that reportedly lands like a gut punch. Their review called the film “spectacular” and “shattering.”

IndieWire was more measured but no less impressed, noting that Malek’s work here is “probably the most affecting of his career” — a quieter, more inward-facing performance than anything he’s done before, and a deliberate departure from the larger-than-life showmanship of Freddie Mercury. The review praised Sachs for sidestepping every AIDS-movie cliché: there are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on display, no tearful bedside vigils playing for easy emotion. Just a man who wants to keep making art for as long as his body will let him.

The character of Jimmy, multiple critics noted, was inspired by real figures from New York’s queer arts underground — Ron Vawter of The Wooster Group, performance artist and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger, and comedian Frank Maya — all of whom kept performing until the very end.

A Big Night at the Palais

The premiere at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Wednesday, May 20 drew a crowd that included Demi Moore, Halsey, and filmmaker Chloé Zhao alongside the film’s cast. Malek, Sturridge, Hall, and Moss-Bachrach all walked the red carpet before the screening that would leave the room on its feet for eight solid minutes.

The Man I Love is one of only two American films competing for the Palme d’Or this year — the other being James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson. It also marks Malek’s first time headlining a Cannes competition film. MUBI holds international distribution rights; U.S. distribution is still being negotiated.

It’s worth remembering what Malek said about the moment he finally stopped being afraid and started discovering who Jimmy George really was: a man similar to Freddie Mercury in some ways, but worlds apart in others. Standing in that theater, in tears, the audience refusing to sit down — it’s hard to argue with the decision he made.

The post Rami Malek Cried at Cannes Ovation for ‘The Man I Love’ appeared first on Cream.

• Rami Malek plays Jimmy George, a downtown New York performance artist living with AIDS in the late 1980s, in Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love
• The film world-premiered in official competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Sachs’ first time back in competition since Frankie in 2019
• Critics are calling Malek’s performance the best of his career, surpassing his Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody
• Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and newcomer Luther Ford co-star; the film is currently seeking U.S. distribution
• Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias spent 15 years developing the story, which was inspired by Maurice Pialat’s film Van Gogh

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RdBfLft2buY%3Fversion%3D3%26enablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fdeadline.com%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den-US%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

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.

The post Rami Malek Stuns Cannes in Ira Sachs’ ‘The Man I Love’ appeared first on Cream.