“My father said you got to swallow your feelings.” Jimmy Page, the fictional actor at the center of Ira Sachs’ new film The Man I Love, makes this remark in character as a hardened chanteuse in a play he is rehearsing, but he may as well be speaking about himself. Played by Rami Malek with elusive charisma that slowly fades into ragged vulnerability, Jimmy is a star of the downtown experimental theatre scene in 1980s New York City whose work and life are threatened by the encroaching symptoms of AIDS-related illnesses. Sachs stringently resists the standard narrative beats of AIDS dramas designed to elicit cathartic emotional outpourings. Rather, Sachs trains his focus on Jimmy’s pursuit of pleasure to stave off suffering, and the anxieties and resentments his hedonism provokes in those close to him. Sachs’ disciplined approach resists cliché to such an extent that AIDS is never explicitly mentioned; the syndrome hovers about the film like a specter while Jimmy and his loved ones try to focus on their daily affairs. The characters of The Man I Love spend their days swallowing their feelings out of necessity; their buried pains prove all the more agonizing when they, inevitably, burst forth unbidden.
Sachs opens The Man I Love with Jimmy returning to his shared apartment with his partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) after a stint in the hospital. Jimmy is in good spirits and relatively good health, and while he settles back into his domestic routine with Dennis — who acts more as a full-time caretaker than an equal partner — he also is intrigued by his new downstairs neighbor, Vincent (Luther Ford). Vincent is a charming twentysomething who has just moved to New York, and he is as compelled by Jimmy’s mystique as Jimmy is by Vincent’s youthful good looks. At the same time as he embarks on a love affair with Vincent, Jimmy’s professional life continues apace with a starring role in his theatre company’s new play, though he is frustrated by his uncharacteristic inability to remember his lines. Jimmy ignores the signs of his own declining health and the concerns of his loved ones, instead continually enjoying his life’s joys: love, sex, theatre, musical performances, dinner parties, dancing.
Sachs uses a minimalistic approach to propel the relatively sparse plot and develop his characters. In the place of traditional narrative development, Sachs uses much of the film’s runtime to luxuriate in episodes of social, artistic, and erotic pleasure. A representative example is a homecoming party for Jimmy early in the film that culminates in the guests singing folk songs and show tunes one-by-one, with all in attendance aglow in the joy of collective music-making. Sachs also spends extended time in rehearsals with Jimmy’s eclectic theatre company, in bed with Jimmy and Luther in post-coital relaxation, and at a club where shirtless men dance close to pulsating bass.
If Jimmy steeps himself in pleasure, and Sachs cues the viewer to follow, then Dennis acts as a counterweight, constantly reminding both Jimmy and the viewer of the brutal reality of Jimmy’s illness. Sturridge gives a melancholy, beleaguered performance; in his weary face, one sees his unconditional love for Jimmy and his resentment toward Jimmy’s lack of acknowledgment for his steadfast caregiving. It is telling that one of the film’s most substantial scenes of dialogue is a tense exchange between Dennis and Luther, which culminates in Dennis pinning Luther against a wall in anger for what he sees as his carelessness in having sex with Jimmy. The scene succinctly represents the characters’ narrative functions: pain-stricken experience and youthful ignorance. Neither is equipped to handle the cognitive dissonance of Jimmy’s simultaneous ravaging illness and continuing life.
Malek is tasked with embodying this dissonance, which goes some way toward explaining his idiosyncratic performance. His acting style is highly gestural and laden with behavioral tics, a twitchy physicality that stands in contrast to the mumbly baritone he speaks in. The performance, at first, is absorbing yet distancing, with a display of surface-level technique that does not provide access to deeper intimacy. Something breaks in Jimmy’s presentation, though, when he performs, and Malek’s performance engages on a more visceral level in turn. In the dinner party scene, Malek is sweetly intimate when Jimmy joins his sister Brenda (Rebecca Hall, as luminous as she was in Sachs’ last film Peter Hujar’s Day) in a rendition of “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” and he delivers a languorously romantic performance of George and Ira Gershwin’s torch song “The Man I Love” at a bar. Behind the psychological safety of the fourth wall, Sachs suggests, Jimmy can express his innermost emotions honestly; the implication is that if he did so in his regular life, he may fall apart.
The pinnacle of Malek’s performance — and arguably of the film as a whole — is when Jimmy sings Melanie’s “Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma” at an anniversary party for his parents, accompanying himself on the guitar. A jaunty tune with lyrics that suggest the destruction and exploitation of the human spirit, Malek’s performance escalates in intensity until his voice becomes a ragged, desperate howl, the song a lament for his violently circumscribed future: “Look what they done to my brain / Well they picked it like a chicken bone / And I think I’m half insane, ma.” The discontinuity between the genteel family event and the abject pain Malek emanates is jarring; the depths of betrayal at the hands of his own body (and, implicitly, a negligent government) are almost too much to bear. Look what they’ve done to his song.
The film’s formal qualities track with Jimmy’s slow decompensation: Director of photography Josée Deshaies’ warm, color-drenched frames grow sterile and detached, and editor Affonso Gonçalves’ precise, time-jumping cuts intensify in consequence as Jimmy’s life diminishes. AIDS does not deliver catharsis, reconciliation, or revelation in The Man I Love, as a more conventional film might suggest to give its viewer a sense of emotional fulfillment. Here, as in life, the disease only lays waste to lives that were once fully and vibrantly lived. Yet Sachs’ film is not nihilistic or resigned to the desolation left in the wake of the AIDS pandemic. Indeed, it is significant that the film centers on a character so devoted to holding on to what he can in life for as long as he can, and equally so that the film’s final frames show men dancing together, an expression of defiant freedom.
Formally challenging and narratively sparse as it can be, The Man I Love proves to be a significant work of queer cinema that finds insights both confrontational and tender by looking back to a long-gone but treasured subculture. Sachs’ film is at once an elegy to a lost generation of queer artists, represented in the compelling form of Jimmy Page, and a paean to life’s immortal joys.
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.