‘The Man I Love’ Review – Love And Sickness In New York City [TIFF 2026]

The 1980s New York queer scene is often portrayed as a place of unrestrained glamour and tragedy, with the looming AIDS crisis frequently defining how the period is remembered on screen. Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love thankfully takes a different approach than what we are used to. The crisis is there, hanging over the characters and shaping the way they live, but Sachs is less interested in turning Jimmy George’s diagnosis into the entirety of his identity. Instead what he does here is he gives us a man who is complicated, selfish, charismatic, loving, frustrating, and deeply reckless. Jimmy knows his time may be limited but that knowledge doesn’t make him a better person, if anything, it seems to make him more determined to live exactly as he wants, regardless of who gets hurt along the way.

That feels very much in keeping with Sachs’ filmography. Passages examined the damage caused by a man’s narcissism and selfish impulses while Keep the Lights On dealt with the exhausting reality of loving someone struggling with addiction. The Man I Love continues that interest in difficult people, but its setting gives those familiar Sachs themes a particularly melancholy weight. This is a film about living while knowing that life can be taken away from you, and about how that knowledge can change the way a person treats the people closest to them.

Jimmy, played by Rami Malek, is an actor living in 1980s New York City who is currently rehearsing a gender-bending stage adaptation of André Brassard’s Il était une fois dans l’est. He shares an apartment with his partner Dennis, played by Tom Sturridge, and spends much of his time moving between rehearsals, performances, parties, and the people who orbit his life. Then Vincent, played by Luther Ford, moves into the apartment next door. There is an immediate attraction between them, and what initially looks like the beginning of a conventional affair gradually becomes something more complicated.

Sachs and longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, here working together for their sixth feature, aren’t particularly interested in turning this into a conventional love triangle. There isn’t a tidy division between the person who is right and the person who is wrong as Jimmy is clearly behaving selfishly, but the film never reduces him to his worst decisions. Dennis, meanwhile, could have been written as the sad partner forced to watch his relationship fall apart, yet Sturridge gives him much more dignity than that. He understands Jimmy in a way that for me, is really painful to watch.

Sturridge is excellent. There is a very specific quality to the way he looks after Jimmy, almost like he has accepted that trying to control him would be pointless. He knows the kind of person he is with. There is love there, but there is also an understanding of the reality of Jimmy’s situation. At times, Dennis seems to occupy the space between boyfriend and caretaker, and Sturridge plays that distinction beautifully without making him seem pathetic. There is real strength in the restraint of the performance.

Malek is even better. This may very well be his best performance. Jimmy is theatrical by nature, and Malek finds fascinating ways to show how much of his personality is constructed as he practically lives in the skin of Jimmy. Early in the film, he demonstrates at a party how he can alter his body language to change the way people perceive him. That idea carries through the entire performance. Jimmy rarely seems physically relaxed. Malek holds his body in a way that makes him look almost permanently wound up, as if he is consciously controlling every movement.

That could easily have become mannered, but Malek mostly finds the person underneath it. Jimmy is somebody who performs even when he isn’t onstage, and the film understands that distinction. Some of Malek’s acting choices are admittedly a little heavy, particularly when Jimmy’s theatrical personality begins to bleed into his everyday behavior, but it makes sense for the character. He is an actor playing a man who is constantly conscious of how he is being perceived.

Sachs also gives Malek room to actually perform. Some of the rehearsal scenes unfold in long, patient takes, allowing him to experiment with different readings and physical choices. It makes the process of acting feel tangible rather than simply showing us the finished performance. Malek is also given a chance to sing, and he has a genuinely beautiful voice. His performance of the Gershwin song that gives the film its title is one of the movie’s most memorable moments.

Music plays a surprisingly important role throughout the film, though calling The Man I Love a musical would be misleading. During one party sequence, Jimmy’s family and members of his theatrical ensemble take turns singing brief sections of songs a cappella. Rebecca Hall gets one of those moments as Jimmy’s sister Brenda, and even though she isn’t in the movie nearly enough, she makes an impression. Hall has become incredibly good at making tiny emotional gestures feel enormous. There is one moment when a tear gathers in the corner of her eye, and it says more than a lengthy monologue could have.

Luther Ford is another major discovery. Making his feature film debut after playing Prince Harry on The Crown, Ford brings an unpredictable energy to Vincent. He is younger than Jimmy and Dennis, and Ford doesn’t try to hide that. Instead, he plays Vincent as someone desperately trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he is more mature than he actually is. He seems to believe that adulthood means having certainty, which is obviously something almost nobody actually has.

His chemistry with Malek is particularly strong. There is an impulsiveness to Vincent that makes him a natural match for Jimmy, but there is also a vulnerability underneath it. Ford understands that Vincent isn’t simply there to disrupt Jimmy and Dennis’ relationship. He is another young man trying to figure out who he is, and the confidence he projects often feels like a performance of its own.

The film’s visual style is also worth mentioning. Megan Gray’s costumes are gorgeous without falling into the trap of making the 1980s look like a costume party. There are no exaggerated shoulder pads or neon outfits designed to scream “this is the ’80s.” Instead, the clothing feels sophisticated and lived-in, giving these characters the kind of metropolitan style that feels believable for the period. Jimmy’s collection of polos is particularly good, while his costume as a female character in the play provides one of the film’s funniest visual moments. Watching Malek attempt to walk in heels has a wonderfully awkward first-time-in-drag quality that briefly cuts through the film’s melancholy.

What I appreciate most about The Man I Love, though, is how unwilling it is to make Jimmy’s illness define the entire story. The AIDS crisis is an unavoidable reality of his life, but Sachs doesn’t turn him into a symbol or an inspirational figure. Jimmy isn’t suddenly noble because he is sick. He remains selfish. He remains horny. He remains difficult. He lies, he hurts people and he makes impulsive decisions. There is something deeply human about that. That also makes the film sadder. Jimmy knows something that the people around him may not fully understand, and that knowledge hangs over his decisions. There is a sense that he doesn’t want to waste time pretending to be somebody else. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, and Sachs never asks us to excuse it. He simply allows us to understand it.

That is what makes The Man I Love such a compelling addition to Sachs’ body of work. It isn’t interested in giving us a cleaned-up version of its characters or its setting where it more so understands that a person’s circumstances can make their behavior more understandable without making that behavior acceptable. Jimmy is difficult, but he is also loving. Dennis is patient, but he is also a person with his own needs. Vincent is young and impulsive, but he isn’t simply naïve. Everyone here is carrying something.

Sachs once again finds drama in the uncomfortable spaces between those contradictions. The Man I Love is melancholy without being sentimental, intimate without becoming overly precious, and honest about people who don’t always behave well even when we understand exactly why they do. Rami Malek gives the performance that anchors the entire thing, while Tom Sturridge and Luther Ford make the relationships around him feel just as lived-in.

It is a film about people trying to keep living while knowing that life is fragile, and Sachs refuses to turn that fragility into an excuse for anyone. Instead, he gives us people who are simply trying to figure out how to love each other while they still can.

The Man I Love held its Canadian Premiere as part of the Special Presentations section at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. 

Director: Ira Sachs

Screenwriters: Mauricio Zacharias, Ira Sachs

Rated: NR

Runtime: 97m