Cannes 2026 – The Man I Love: Rami Malek moving at Ira Sachs
In competition at Cannes, Ira Sachs recounts the last months of a gay actor suffering from AIDS in New York in the 80s. Without pathos or miserabilism, carried by an immense Rami Malek.
It’s a song that never found its place. Composed in 1924 by the Gershwin brothers for Lady, Be Good, The Man I Love is cut from the libretto just before the premiere. It is then integrated by the two brothers into Strike Up the Bandbut this musical will never be produced. Reconsidered one last time to integrate Rosaliethe piece will be rejected again. Three times orphaned therefore, the song will end up becoming over time an absolute standard of the Songbook, covered by Billie Holiday, Lena Horne or Coltrane. The text written in the future conditional (Some day he’ll come along, the man I love) makes us hear the pain of a woman who is waiting. Suffice to say that making this heartbreaking standard, long put aside, the title of a film about a man on borrowed time and who tries to exist despite everything, is in itself a beautiful poetic idea.
A little context; Ira Sachs returns to New York after two European escapades (Frankie And Passages). Here we follow Jimmy George (Rami Malek), an actor in the middle of rehearsing a play. On paper, we fear the worst, the pile-up of clichés: a devastated actor, the devoted companion, the worried sister (Rebecca Hall, magnificent), the troubled and sexy neighbor and the NY 80s… The whole kit of the tearful melodrama is ready to use. Yet Sachs is going to blow everything up to move on a wire. For example, the word “AIDS” is never mentioned. The reenactment is discreet and Jimmy (like the entire film) just floats. Between two lovers, between two scenes, between two states (illness and survival). In his notes of intent, Sachs mentioned Van Gogh of Pialat. We indeed find the dry ellipses, the scenes which begin too late and end too early, or the stubborn refusal of causality which define Pialat’s style. And his The Man I love does not tell the story of a man who dies, but of a man who tries to survive. Or to live again.
Obviously, everything rests on Rami Malek. The actor of Bohemian Rhapsody arrives with all his post-Mercury tics, his charged magnetism and this way of posing each sentence like a theatrical cue. And Sachs doesn’t even try to tame him. He makes his nature the very material of the role. Jimmy is a man who constantly plays, even when he’s messing up – for example when he teaches his friends to walk like a woman in his living room (magnificent scene). Malek therefore plays an actor who plays, and the illness only arrives by default: it is a text that no longer comes, an absence or a cognitive hole. Sachs transforms his affectation into fragility, and it’s when the actor’s lustrous surface begins to crack that the film becomes truly moving. Like in the central scene where Jimmy climbs onto the bar stage to perform the Gershwin standard, under the gaze of Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and Vincent (Luther Ford). The two men who love her. Malek here no longer sings a song: he inhabits this text which seemed to have been waiting for him forever. If this is the actor’s best role in a very long time, it’s because Sachs understood that it was necessary to film what was overflowing at home.
Sachs talked about Pialat but he also mentioned Bob Fosse and his magnificent All That Jazz. In fact, there are not only the Gerschwins in this film, structured like a compilation. The soundtrack is crossed by Vivaldi, Patty Pravo, Melanie, and each song is an emotional trap, never an illustration. Until this close-up of Malek on guitar at his parents’ house, singing Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Maa message sent to this family who never knew what to do with him. The Man I Love is therefore entirely in its title. Orphan song for a film that follows a man leaving the stage. Standard which sings of a man who will never arrive, for a work which espouses the point of view of a lover looking one last time at the man he loves.
