Ira Sachs brings a queer love story to Cannes Competition with The Man I Love, a late-1980s New York drama centered on young theatre artist Jimmy George, played by Rami Malek. The film follows Jimmy as he tries to keep making work, keep loving his partner Dennis and keep hold of a life that is already narrowing around him.
Dave Calhoun described the film as a “sombre and joyful dramatic portrait” in which love, sex and art “put up a noble fight against death,” and said the script never directly mentions HIV or AIDS. That silence does not soften the stakes. It sharpens them. Jimmy has recently spent three weeks in hospital with pneumonia, Dennis tells a new upstairs neighbour, Vincent, and he is now taking an overwhelming array of drugs, including AZT.
That detail lands with extra force because The Man I Love is set in 1980s New York City, where Sachs places his characters inside a scrappy Off-Off-Broadway adaptation of the 1974 Quebecois film Once Upon A Time In The East. Rami Malek’s Jimmy is supported by Dennis, played by Tom Sturridge, while Rebecca Hall appears as Jimmy’s sister and Luther Ford plays Vincent, the neighbour who learns how precarious Jimmy’s life has become. The film is Sachs’s second time in Cannes Competition after Frankie in 2019, a return that underlines how closely his work has stayed tied to queer lives and New York stories.
The review says Sachs resists melodrama and false emotion, a choice that gives the film its shape. Rather than force the illness to the foreground, he lets it sit in the room, in the pills, in the hospital stay and in the strain between what is spoken and what is only understood. That approach also suggests where the film is likely to find its audience: among Sachs admirers, LGBTQ+ filmgoers and the arthouse crowd that has followed his work from Keep The Lights On in 2012 through Love Is Strange in 2014, Passages in 2023 and Peter Hujar’s Day in 2025.
The strongest moments, the review says, come in the musical scenes when the characters sing the songs themselves. That matters because it tells you what The Man I Love is really after: not pity, and not ornament, but the fragile business of staying alive through performance, intimacy and a stubborn refusal to surrender the stage. Calhoun’s judgment leaves little doubt about the film’s answer to its own premise. Love is not enough to defeat death, but in Sachs’s hands it is still a worthy, and moving, resistance.
