Mere minutes into the grounded gay drama The Man I Love, Rami Malek appears in an unassuming, vulnerable position, as an up-and-coming stage actor in 1980s New York City, poring over a script in his bedroom. And yet, he sets the world on fire, perhaps in ways he never has until now (despite his Oscar-winning role as another queer performer, Freddie Mercury). Something just clicks, and it’s no surprise that the filmmaker who gets him to this place of mercurial naturalism, of curiosity and melancholy, and of lightning intrigue, is Ira Sachs, who crafts an effortlessly inviting 95-minute character study that unfurls in gently tragic hues.
Sachs does here for Malek what he did for Franz Rogowski in Passages and Ben Whishaw in Peter Hujar’s Day: he creates a distinct sense of time, place and texture for his lead actor to occupy and populate with his posture. The Man I Love is not the kind of film that comes out and explains itself — the details of its plot are choked back for ages — but in crafting prickly characters and tactile environments, the queer indie virtuoso guides viewers by the hand, through scenes that play like complicated recollections of a man on the verge of oblivion, attempting to re-locate himself through a new underground stage play after facing debilitating personal struggles.
Malek’s character, Jimmy George, was not a real person, but he feels like a composite of numerous artists Sachs might have known in ‘80s Manhattan, an era defined by both death and booming creativity. Like a figure of Shakespearean history, Jimmy is introduced through the eyes and conversations of other people, including his caring, long-suffering boyfriend Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and his eager new downstairs neighbor Vincent (Luther Ford), with whom he eventually starts an affair. It isn’t long before Vincent is given concerned warnings by friends and acquaintances, though intuiting the reasons why ought not to be difficult for most viewers, given the setting. No one utters the phrases “AIDS” or “HIV” in The Man I Love, but the probability always looms (and is further gestured towards by references to the likes of Klaus Nomi, one of the first public figures to succumb to the disease).
That Vincent is magnetically drawn to Jimmy despite his illness ought not to be a shock. Sachs’ script (co-written with Mauricio Zacharias) and his unobtrusive, voyeuristic long lenses — which capture the joy and frolic of group gatherings up close — help layer Jimmy with a self-effacing quality that feels in constant conflict with his outward confidence. You can’t help but fall in love with him, in an I-can-fix-him sort of way, but it’s also the kind role that’ll immediately make Malek “click” for those who haven’t yet meshed with his appeal. He’s an actor with a very peculiar vibe, whose serpentine affectations have slotted awkwardly into more mainstream fare, from the aforementioned Bohemian Rhapsody, to his strange miscasting as a charismatic Tom Cruise-type in — of all things — the Nazi drama Nuremberg.
Here, however, Sachs breaks Malek down to his fundamentals, exploring the impetus behind everything that makes him tick, as though the story and character had been tailor-fitted to his particular idiosyncrasies. Jimmy is a theatre kid who, when the film begins, has already clearly been through the wringer. His visiting family — his sister Brenda (Rebecca Hall) and her husband Gene (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who are accepting and concerned — dance around the specifics of his troubles. But they seem glad that he’s throwing himself back into his work, as an avenue to truly living once again, allowing us to intuit the mood of their reunion, if not its exact details. Jimmy’s director and co-stars, meanwhile, embrace him while wrestling with his temperament, as their group tries to translate and stage an intimate musical about a bar singer, by working class Quebecois playwright Michel Tremblay. In getting to the heart of this re-interpretation, Sachs further centers the New York-ness of it all, but he also allows Jimmy (and therefore, Malek) the freedom to fully embody the idea of a performer, inside and out. In the process, artifice upon artifice becomes an honest window to the soul, which radiates through leaks and cracks.
Numerous musical detours fill the runtime, each of them diegetic, from folks songs crooned at a party, to the numbers in the stage production. They each reveal the fears and anxieties bubbling just beneath Jimmy’s skin. That he’s the center of attention in all these scenes seems to be keeping him alive, but the pressure he puts on himself is a slow death of a different kind. The Man I Love may as well be about the difficult acceptance of oblivion, an existential question New York’s once-thriving gay community was faced with at the time.
While the movie’s plot is simple and straightforward — Can Jimmy remember his lines? Will he attend his parents’ upcoming anniversary? — these queries are colored in complex hues. Through Malek’s rankled subtleties, they undergo an enthralling metamorphosis, suggesting that the nature of forgetting his role, or refusing a family invitation, have become much more than mere faux pas, and are now tied to an artistic soul that might slowly be dematerializing. That Jimmy plays his stage part dressed in drag is a fun little detail, but its dramatic purpose is to reveal the effervescence with which he seeks to capture the feminine form, a process he displays with enrapturing excitement and mischief before a gathering of friends and family. It’s perhaps here that Malek, like Jimmy, most reveals his inner truth, a someone on a lifelong quest for honesty, but who has remained hidden for much of his life. Sachs reveals him with electricity.
The Man I Love is just as much about an artist fighting not to lose himself as it is a lament about the kind of creativity and complexity that was lost at the height of the AIDS crisis. This silent killer hovers in the background, threatening to rob the characters (as well as the audience) of much-needed catharsis whenever Jimmy causes a row. His very existence, even as a late thirty-something, threatens to remain an open-ended question, which Malek asks with each swivel of his chin, each thoroughly embodied sex scene, and each refusal to engage with his family on potentially pressing personal matters.
Time never stops ticking. But for brief moments, Malek’s performance — one defined by constant physical and emotional movement, in a desperate attempt to outrun the clock — is powerful enough to make the Earth stand still. Jimmy may not have existed in a technical sense, but his imprinted abstraction becomes a vital epitaph to an entire generation, making The Man I Love both one of Sach’s finest works, and one of the most emotionally piercing films to play at Cannes this year.
