The title of Ira Sachs’ tenth feature film comes from the Ella Fitzgerald ballad of the same name, which Jimmy George (Rami Malek) performs at a queer club to a rapt audience. Among them is his young neighbour Vincent (Luther Ford) who’s taken quite the shine to the man upstairs – a feline, charismatic actor who lives with his serious, quiet partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge). Despite warnings from his roommate Leslie that Jimmy was extremely sick before Vincent moved in and he should be careful with both his heart and body, Vincent remains defiant. “Love happens,” he declares with the stubbornness of youth, taking it upon himself to be a source of artistic inspiration for his new lover.
But puppy love can’t protect Vincent from the reality facing Jimmy. The word ‘AIDS’ is never spoken in the film, but it’s the phantom that haunts the narrative, referred to in euphemisms or the scene where Dennis coldly shows Vincent the large cocktail of medication he prepares for Jimmy each week. This is New York City during the late 1980s; as much as Jimmy wants to focus on his upcoming starring role in an experimental theatre piece inspired by Michel Tremblay’s Il Etait un Fois Dans L’Est, real life has a nasty habit of encroaching on the fantastical.
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Yet the film gives a gorgeous sense of who Jimmy is through two musical sequences; the first at the bar where he sings Ella Fitzgerald, and the latter at his parents’ wedding anniversary where he performs ‘Look What They Did To My Song, Ma’ by Melanie (a pointed choice, given the co-opting of queerness that has taken place in the decades since the AIDS crisis). Malek is at his best in these two moments, sensitively capturing the freedom that exists in the former environment and sense of conformity in the latter, even with parents who, by his own admission, are kinder than most about his sexuality. Both performances also feel like a means of saying goodbye; as reticent as Jimmy and Dennis are to address the inevitable out loud, we see it written all over their faces throughout the film.
It’s a much better turn than Malek gave in his Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody role, though one can’t help but feel he’s still miscast here, never quite coming alive in the way it feels like Jimmy should. Ford and Sturridge are by far the film’s greatest assets, Sturridge particularly in a role that is almost entirely reactive. It’s a shame the central performer is somewhat lacking, as the film Sachs has built around Malek’s performance is stunning in its sensitivity and simplicity; a eulogy for thousands of queer lives ended before their time be it through the AIDs crisis, suicide or the ramifications of homophobia the world over. There’s tragedy in The Man I Love, but such a specific sense of love in its many forms – familial, romantic, platonic, artistic – that the pain never becomes too much to bare.
