The Man I Love

Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love opens with a premise that seems deceptively familiar: a theatre actor living with AIDS, surrounded by lovers, artists and the chaos of 1980s New York. Yet Sachs avoids anything Rent-adjacent and, rather than framing the film around illness itself, focuses on something more unsettling – what happens to a person’s sense of self as their body begins to fail.

Jimmy George (Rami Malek) has recently returned home from hospital and is rehearsing what may be his final stage production. He is surrounded by people trying, in different ways, to keep him afloat: his exhausted yet devoted boyfriend Dennis (Tom Sturridge); his sister Brenda (Rebecca Hall), whose love for him never slips into pity; and Vincent (Luther Ford), the younger tenant downstairs whose infatuation with Jimmy brings fresh volatility into both of their lives. Even Jimmy’s suburban parents, clearly uncomfortable with parts of his life they cannot fully understand, remain a grudgingly supportive presence.

Sachs is firm in his refusal to dramatise suffering in conventional ways. There are a few medical scenes and almost no explicit discussion of AIDS. Instead, the reality of Jimmy’s condition emerges through small humiliations and private frustrations that gradually accumulate over the course of the film. Jimmy struggles to remember lines during rehearsals. Physical routines that once came naturally leave him exhausted. Meals he once loved become impossible to finish. Malek delivers a predictably strong and layered performance, particularly in the rehearsal scenes, where Jimmy’s growing panic over his fading memory sits beneath an increasingly brittle confidence. The performance occasionally recalls Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, though stripped of the narcissism and theatrical excess. Jimmy’s relationship to performance feels less obsessive than necessary, as though theatre is the final structure holding his life together.

The film’s physical spaces are rendered with remarkable precision. The worn-down townhouse shared by Jimmy, Dennis, Vincent and an endless stream of other tenants feels both cramped and strangely expansive, filled with creaking floorboards, unlocked doors and neighbours drifting constantly between apartments. The rehearsal spaces carry that same authenticity: modest, shabby and constrained by an Off-Broadway budget, yet still alive with creative energy, every inch of the room fully utilised.

For all its grief, The Man I Love never strains for easy tragedy. Sachs keeps the focus tightly on ordinary moments, allowing the emotional weight of the film to emerge naturally. The result is a restrained and deeply affecting portrait of a man trying to hold onto himself as the foundations of his world begin to disappear.