The Man I Love Cannes Review Roundup: Ira Sachs returns to Cannes Competition with a late-1980s New York drama about art, desire, illness and queer community during the AIDS crisis. Starring Rami Malek as Jimmy George, a Downtown performance artist facing mortality while preparing for what may be his final stage work, the film has drawn largely admiring but not unanimous reviews.
Directed by Ira Sachs and written by Sachs with Maurício Zacharias, The Man I Love stars Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, Rebecca Hall and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Set in New York during the late 1980s, the film follows Jimmy George, a theatre and performance artist who has recently survived an AIDS-related health crisis. He is taking AZT, trying to return to creative life, and living with the knowledge that time may be limited.
Jimmy’s partner Dennis, played by Tom Sturridge, cares for him with quiet devotion, managing medication and holding together the practical side of their life. Jimmy’s sister Brenda, played by Rebecca Hall, arrives with her family, bringing another emotional layer to the story. At the same time, a young British neighbour, Vincent, played by Luther Ford, becomes fascinated by Jimmy, and their attraction complicates Jimmy’s already fragile relationship with Dennis.
The film is built around love, performance, sex, music and the urgency of making art while illness closes in. But critics have been careful to note that Sachs does not appear interested in making a conventional AIDS drama. The early response suggests that The Man I Love is less about death as a final event and more about the ways people keep living, desiring, singing and performing while death is already in the room.
The overall critical mood is admiring but not simple. Many critics praise the film’s late-1980s New York atmosphere, its queer community detail, its refusal to become a standard tearjerker and its use of music as emotional release. Several reviews also describe Rami Malek’s performance as powerful, transformative or career-best. At the same time, some critics find the film opaque, elusive or too dependent on a lead performance that does not fully convince them.
In Variety, Owen Gleiberman calls The Man I Love a small, delicate and disarmingly precise drama. He argues that Malek has found a role closely tailored to his talents, playing Jimmy as an amateur performance artist battling AIDS and keeping illness at bay with AZT. Gleiberman praises Malek for giving the character anger, tenderness, instability and individuality, describing Jimmy as a morosely charismatic figure whose need to be seen is inseparable from his fading physical condition.
Variety also sees the film as Sachs making something like a documentary about a fictional person. The characters do not behave like people arranged for a conventional melodrama; they mumble, drift, gather, rehearse and perform as if being observed in fragments. That looseness gives the film its lived-in quality. For Gleiberman, one of the emotional highlights is Jimmy singing Melanie’s “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma,” a scene he reads as an expression of sadness, defiance and a life whose voice is being lost.
Screen Daily also responds strongly to Malek’s performance, while acknowledging the film’s deliberate difficulty. Dave Calhoun describes The Man I Love as a sombre and joyful portrait of a queer theatre artist in late-1980s New York, where love, sex and art put up a noble fight against death. He notes that the film strongly resists melodrama and false emotion, which makes it feel both empowering and enigmatic.
For Screen Daily, Malek embraces Jimmy’s magnetism, pride and vulnerability, creating a performance built on resilience with flashes of fragility. The review also highlights the way Sachs and Zacharias avoid a conventional tearjerker structure. The script does not even directly name HIV or AIDS, instead allowing illness to emerge through details such as pneumonia, AZT and the weight of medication. This restraint gives the film a non-exploitative quality, though it can also make the drama feel elusive.
The musical scenes appear to be among the film’s most praised elements. Screen Daily says the film comes most alive when Jimmy sings, especially in his performances of Melanie’s “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma” and George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.” These moments allow Sachs to place the film’s strongest emotions inside music rather than speech. The question of who exactly is loved, and by whom, remains open, which fits the film’s interest in desire, care and emotional ambiguity.
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter offers one of the most enthusiastic responses, calling the film “an elegy defiantly tethered to life.” He places The Man I Love within Sachs’ recent run of queer dramas and sees it as connected to Passages and Peter Hujar’s Day. Rooney praises the film’s late-1980s alternative theatre and performance setting, noting its references to the downtown scene, experimental theatre, drag venues and performance culture.
For The Hollywood Reporter, Malek is transformative as Jimmy George, a downtown theatre artist whose creativity and illness are inseparable from his need to remain alive in every possible sense. Rooney also gives strong attention to Tom Sturridge’s Dennis, describing him as the quiet emotional counterweight to Jimmy’s magnetism. Dennis provides care, loyalty and stability, but the film also shows the pain of loving someone who consumes the room and still reaches for new desire.
The review also praises Rebecca Hall as Brenda, Jimmy’s sister, and the way the film builds a sense of chosen family and biological family around him. Rooney argues that Sachs has not made a familiar AIDS movie, because the film is not primarily about death. It is about wringing every last drop out of life through creativity, love, sex, music and performance. He describes Malek’s final stretch as some of the best work the actor has ever done.
TheWrap also reads the film as a major emotional achievement. Chase Hutchinson describes The Man I Love as a poetic, profound and patient portrait of an artist facing the end. The review emphasizes how Sachs fills Jimmy’s life with pleasure, creativity, community and desire, even while death remains present. Rather than reducing the AIDS crisis to suffering alone, the film looks at the ways people continue to dance, love and live when time is running out.
That response is important because it captures the film’s emotional intention. The Man I Love does not seem designed as a history lesson or a conventional illness drama. It is closer to a memory piece, shaped by fragments of performance, domestic care, sexual longing and artistic ritual. TheWrap notes that Malek’s performance can sometimes feel forced, but ultimately finds it moving, especially in the way the film builds toward its final scene.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond also praises Malek’s work strongly. In his reaction, he calls the performance brave and wonderfully lived-in, describing it as a career high for the Oscar-winning actor. Hammond’s response supports the view that, for many critics, Malek is not the film’s weakness but its emotional center: a performer inhabiting a man whose days may be limited but whose spirit remains active.
IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio offers one of the most useful middle-ground responses. He calls The Man I Love melancholy, sexy and piercingly sad, while also noting that it is elusive to think about and hold in one’s hand. The review praises Sachs for avoiding the clichés of AIDS dramas, pointing out that the film does not rely on familiar visual shorthand or repeated tearful bedside scenes. Instead, it focuses on Jimmy’s relationship with Dennis, his affair with Vincent and the emotional damage created by desire under the pressure of mortality.
IndieWire also praises the film’s immersive sense of the Manhattan arts scene and describes the central drama as a destructive romantic triangle. Lattanzio sees Tom Sturridge’s Dennis as a figure of quiet pain, aware that Jimmy’s attraction to Vincent may be another attempt to feel alive before the end. He also notes that Vincent, played by Luther Ford, is too young and inexperienced to understand how he is being used as a muse, even if the erotic spark between him and Jimmy is real.
On Malek, IndieWire is admiring but not uncritical. The review calls his performance possibly the most affecting of his career, while also saying that at times he appears to be acting rather than fully dissolving into the part. That caveat is useful because it captures the wider debate around the film. Malek’s Jimmy is meant to be theatrical, magnetic and self-aware, but some critics still feel the performance occasionally shows its effort. IndieWire ultimately gives the film a B+, calling it a work that will hurt viewers.
The Film Stage provides the clearest counterpoint to the stronger praise. Rory O’Connor argues that Sachs creates an immersive and lovingly crafted world, evoking the late-1980s New York queer scene with detail and affection. The review connects the film to Sachs’ earlier work, including Peter Hujar’s Day, Last Address and Keep the Lights On, all of which engage with queer memory, art and the AIDS era in different ways.
But The Film Stage is less convinced by Malek’s lead performance. O’Connor argues that the film does not fully capture Jimmy with the same level of detail as the world around him. While he praises certain performance scenes, the soundtrack, the bar sequences and a steamy sex-club moment, he says the film is held back by a lack of chemistry between Malek and his co-stars, especially Tom Sturridge and Luther Ford. In this reading, the atmosphere is richer than the central performance.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw also represents the more skeptical side of the response. He recognizes the film’s AIDS-era New York setting and Sachs’ interest in queer life under the shadow of illness and social hostility. But he argues that Malek needs a lighter touch, finding the performance too theatrical or self-conscious for the film’s emotional register. This criticism does not reject the film’s subject or setting; it questions whether the central performance fits the intimacy Sachs is trying to create.
That is the key debate around The Man I Love. Many critics see Malek as transformative, powerful, brave and deeply moving. Others feel that his performance remains too visible, too mannered or not fully connected to the people around him. The debate is not simply whether Jimmy is theatrical. He is a performance artist, and theatricality is part of his identity. The question is whether Malek’s heightened style deepens Jimmy’s hunger to be seen, or whether it keeps the audience at a distance from the film’s quieter emotional truths.
Across the reviews, the common praise is clear. Critics admire the late-1980s New York atmosphere, the queer community detail, the chosen-family texture and Sachs’ refusal to make a conventional AIDS tearjerker. The film’s music and performance scenes are repeatedly singled out, especially Jimmy’s renditions of “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma” and “The Man I Love.” Tom Sturridge’s quiet work as Dennis, Rebecca Hall’s presence as Brenda and Josée Deshaies’ cinematography also emerge as strengths.
The common criticism is equally clear. The film can feel opaque and elusive. Its drama is spare rather than conventionally shaped. The performance-art material may feel murky to some viewers. The chemistry between Jimmy, Dennis and Vincent does not convince every critic. And while many reviews praise Malek, others find his performance too self-conscious or not fully absorbed into Sachs’ intimate style.
From a Planet of Films perspective, The Man I Love appears to be less about dying than about the refusal to let death become the only story. Sachs’ film uses music, performance, sex, friendship and chosen family as ways of preserving a life that illness is trying to erase. Jimmy is not presented only as a victim or symbol. He is vain, magnetic, needy, loving, selfish, creative and afraid. That complexity seems to be what gives the film its emotional charge.
The most interesting critical divide is whether Malek’s performance captures that complexity or pushes it too hard. For supporters, his Jimmy is a man fighting disappearance through art and desire. For skeptics, the performance remains too mannered to fully disappear into the film’s delicate world. Either way, the debate itself shows how central Malek is to the film’s impact.
The Cannes response suggests that The Man I Love is one of Ira Sachs’ most intimate and emotionally textured films, admired for its queer memory, late-1980s New York atmosphere and refusal to reduce AIDS to simple tragedy. Many critics praise Rami Malek’s performance as powerful, lived-in and possibly career-best, while others feel the role remains too mannered or lacks the chemistry needed to fully carry the story. The film’s strongest moments appear to come through music, performance and quiet gestures of care, making it a moving but deliberately elusive portrait of art, love and mortality.
Film: The Man I Love
Director: Ira Sachs
Writers: Ira Sachs, Maurício Zacharias
Cast: Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Festival: Cannes Film Festival
Section: Competition
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 95 minutes
Production Companies: Big Creek Projects, SBS Productions, MK2 Films, Merino Films
International Sales: MK2 Films
Premise: In late-1980s New York, Jimmy George, a Downtown theatre artist recovering from an AIDS-related health crisis, tries to keep creating, loving and performing while illness, desire and mortality reshape the final chapter of his life.
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