5 Minutes
New York, 1988: fear and joy braided together. Streets were dangerous and electric. Creativity felt urgent and combustible. Ira Sachs has long been the city's attentive chronicler, and his latest film, The Man I Love, reads like a letter to that time—part memoir, part elegy.
Set amid the height of the AIDS crisis, the film follows Jimmy George, a downtown performer determined to take on one last role even as illness tightens its grip. Sachs drew on his own life—on the friends he lost, the lovers he watched suffer, the theater scene that pulsed with invention—to build a story that refuses to be only tragic. It insists on the messy, stubborn fact that people kept living, and making, and loving.
Rami Malek anchors the film as Jimmy. He is not an obvious choice at first glance, but Sachs explains how he was drawn to Malek's naturalistic cadence from Mr. Robot and to the actor's rare magnetic presence. Short sentences hit. Long sentences pull you along. Malek’s performances turn musical numbers into conversations: songs that argue, confess, and forgive. Music becomes a language, and the stage becomes the place where memory and desire collide.
Sachs pushes back on the label that trailed the project early on. The Man I Love was called a musical fantasy by some. Sachs smiles at that and corrects the record: the film lived its way into being. One dreamlike scene was excised in editing. What remains is a drama thick with music, not a conventional musical. This process—discovering a film as you make it—is how Sachs has always worked. He trusts revelation more than a preordained blueprint.
There are moments that sting with detail: Jimmy back home at his parents' anniversary, slipping awkwardly into a suit that doesn't fit, more a fish-out-of-water than a star. Sachs understands the split between origins and chosen family, and he stages that gulf with a clarity born of memory. The East Village of the 70s and 80s, he says, still fuels him. That creative explosion arose from terror as much as possibility. The era was brutal. It was alive.
One question the film has already sparked: should straight actors play gay roles? Sachs answers with a tossed-off line that is disarmingly practical: he doesn’t ask people who they’ve slept with. Casting, for him, is about truth of performance, not the anatomy of an actor’s past. It’s a position bound to invite debate. But Sachs’s priority is the work and whether a performer can inhabit the moral and emotional life of a character.
Premiering at Cannes, the film landed among some of Sachs’s strongest reviews to date. For a director steeped in European cinematic language—whose approach is often more naturalist than theatrical—the festival felt like a homecoming. Sachs admires European film for its search for essence over spectacle, even as his own films remain rooted in intimate, domestic drama.
Funding independent, personal stories has never been easy. Sachs calls himself a hustler: pragmatic about money, rigorous with budgets, and wary of corporate systems that crush the kinds of films he makes. He briefly sampled the studio world and left quickly. Studios, he says, rarely make non-genre queer domestic dramas. So he works within a different economy—one that values creative risk over predictable profit.
And then there is the political backdrop. Sachs has warned that cultural freedoms feel threatened in recent years, that voices once taken for granted are now at risk. History is never neutral; it forgets as often as it remembers. When public memory softens, stories vanish. That is part of why Sachs returned to this particular moment—the film is not only a portrait of loss but also an argument for remembering, for bearing witness with art.
Art becomes the oxygen that lets people keep living onstage and off. Films like this one ask what you do with the time you have left, and they answer by insisting on creation as survival. Viewers who loved Sachs’s earlier work will find familiar moral curiosity here, and newcomers will discover a filmmaker who refuses simple categorization.
Watch for the way songs function as speech, for the small gestures that hold private histories open, and for a movie that wants to keep the past alive without turning it into a museum piece. The Man I Love is a plea, a memory, and a celebration wrapped into one—an invitation to remember what art can do when everything else feels uncertain.
Source: variety
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atomwave
wow, Sachs made the 80s ache and sparkle at once. Rami surprised me, songs felt like honest speech. I'm moved, messy tears
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