Ira Sachs had something real here. A story about HIV-positive gay men surviving Reagan’s America, set against the homophobic rot of 1980s New York , that’s not a small subject. And yet *The Man I Love* keeps tripping over its own leading man.
Rami Malek plays Jimmy George, a celebrated performance artist who’s just spent three weeks in a hospital bed after a near-fatal HIV crisis and comes out the other side ready to star in a stage piece where he plays a defiant, band-fronting character named Hélène , drawn from a 1974 André Brassard film. It’s a lot of weight on one actor’s shoulders. The problem is Malek treats every single scene like it’s carrying that weight, and then some.
Here’s the thing about Malek: he has a genuinely distinctive style. Think John Malkovich energy , highly specific, impossible to ignore, occasionally transcendent. But that kind of performer needs a director willing to reel them in, and Sachs doesn’t really do that here. The result is a performance that’s almost oppressively mannered, even in its quieter moments. Especially in its quieter moments, actually. The spoken scenes feel calculated and airless. The singing scenes are something else entirely , and not in a good way.
There’s a brutal hospital scene early on that captures exactly what this film could’ve been. The cold, bureaucratic indifference aimed at HIV-positive patients in that era , the political climate distilled into a single room. It lands. It feels true. You want the rest of the movie to follow that instinct.
It doesn’t.
Sachs clearly cares deeply about this material. The intentions are good. The period, the politics, the community at the center of the story , all of it deserves a serious film. What it didn’t need was Malek at full, unmodulated Malek, left to fill every frame with the same intensity regardless of what the scene actually calls for.
Some actors elevate a story. Some accidentally become the story. This one’s the latter.
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