One last review from the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival
THE MAN I LOVE ***
Ira Sachs2026
IDEA: Theater actor Jimmy George prepares for a play while he battles HIV/AIDS and partakes in destructive affairs.
BLURB: Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love is, in a sense, a character study. It revolves around an outsize personality and examines his bravado, vulnerability, and cruelty as he fights HIV/AIDS and burns a path of romantic devastation through those closest to him. Rami Malek certainly comes at him like he’s the irresistible center of every room, strutting around with a mannered, self-satisfied swagger and fidgety volatility that demand our attention. Sachs indulges him, but up to a point. As he demonstrated in Peter Hujar’s Day, the filmmaker is less keen on a straightforward character profile than a snapshot of a milieu in which that character existed. (It’s no coincidence a film preoccupied with place should begin with someone — and not Jimmy — moving into a new apartment.) Malek’s preening theatricality, which can read as too-muchness, is interestingly countered by a diffuse approach to narrative that often subsumes him within the larger ensemble. Tom Sturridge stands out just as much playing his viciously spurned lover, as does Rebecca Hall in a performance of utmost naturalism. What is most commanding about The Man I Love, beyond Sachs’s skill with actors, is the lusty sensuality with which he conjures a bygone world and its restless players. He makes artists singing a cappella around a table as raw and intimate as the many scenes of carnal intimacy, with their bracing gay eroticism and quivering emotions. Sachs’s characters live big and crash hard; he doesn’t judge them, but leaves them to face the music, however they may.
