Rami Malek Sinks 'The Man I Love'

Writer-director Ira Sachs has made a distinguished film career for himself detailing the not-always-pretty intricacies of relationships between queer men. In the thirty years since his low-key lovely first feature The Delta (now on Criterion, watch it!) dropped, Sachs has shown us gay lovers torn apart by drug addiction (Keep the Lights On), old age (Love is Strange), and a fondness for really expensive sweaters and bisexual cheating (Passages). Heck Sachs’ previous film Peter Hujar’s Day was simply a gay man monologuing about twenty-four hours of such stuff, and since it was Ben Whishaw doing the talking (and Rebecca Hall doing the listening) it stayed riveting from start to finish. Sachs found a niche and started filling it in, and it’s remained a continued blessing to watch.

So it’s tempting to say that his disappointing latest picture The Man I Love, which stars the inexplicable Oscar-winner Rami Malek as a gay actor battling AIDS in late ’80s New York, has finally found and breached the limits of Sachs’ rummaging around in similar themes all these years—it’s not untrue to say that this very much feels like the poisonous affairs in Keep the Lights On and Passages smashed up and filtered through the immersion of Period NYC that Hujar also just accomplished. And with all of that then gently, very gently, stirred to come up with something that reads as fresh, even if only faintly.

But the blame for The Man I Love’s troubles is actually much less complicated than all of that. The problem with The Man I Love is its leading man’s lousy performance, period.

Simply put, Rami Malek sinks it. Because, if you can get your eyes around him anyway, all of the other stuff surrounding Malek is indeed still working beautifully. Sachs, presumably working within the confines of his usual itty-bitty budgets, gives us a completely believable and lived-in 1980s downtown New York scene. It’s one filled to its edges with characters big and small who feel teleported right out of that time, showcasing actors like the aforementioned Hall as well as Luther Ford (The Crown) and especially, especially the great Tom Sturridge doing some extraordinary feats of heavy lifting, performance-wise.

The problem is they’re lifting their performances up to keep them safe from the black hole of phony affectation that is Malek’s central turn. Playing a well-known (fictionally so) performance artist named Jimmy George, this was always (no matter the actor cast in the role) going to be a character that came across as big. A necesarry point that the film is making, and one of hardest truths to come to grips with from the ravaging AIDS gave this community starting under Reagan’s reign of terror, is the bigness of the performers we lost—these were often the most adventurous artists and humans around; people who were continually testing the limits. We lost an entire generation of big beautiful queer brilliance.

But Malek makes of Jimmy a grotesquerie—all flitting hands and undulating pupils, it’s very hard to understand why anyone would’ve been so drawn toward the deeply inauthentic caricature Malek delivers. One that never signals any life beneath those enormous unblinking eyeballs. Granted the character of Jimmy is actually staring into an abyss—we would all be justifiably panicked to find ourselves wearing Jimmy’s big black platform shoes. But that’s seemingly the only note Malek can conjure—it’s a gesticulating bag of tics in tight t-shirts, an askew wig and a movie poster for John Cassavetes’ masterpiece Opening Night hung on the wall in order to plug up and paper over Malek’s complete lack of depth or interiority. To be blunt (well, more) this is an uncomfortable and often embarrassing performance to suffer through.

Which is a great big gay shame because otherwise, as stated above, there is much to love here. Rebecca Hall couldn’t play a false note in a Ryan Murphy project or a King Kong movie, so you know she steals her every (too too infrequent) second of screen-time as Jimmy’s loving but terrified sister. And The Bear star Ebon Moss-Bacharach’s role as Hall’s kind husband is even smaller still, but he also acquits himself nicely—with this and his role in Andrew Haigh’s upcoming film The Long Winter (which is also screening at NYFF) he’s handing us a lovely double-feature of straight dads gently confounded by queerness this fall.

Luther Ford is also doing great and pretty fearless work playing VIncent, the Rogowski-esque messy and destructive role in the story. A new neighbor who sweeps in and upends the relationship between Jimmy and his loving longtime companion Dennis (Sturridge), Vincent seemingly has not a single care in the world toward the concept of human decency. He’s a sexy monster, is what he is, but a lot of people scared out of their minds right then were. Monsters anyway. And hell still are. Plagues bring their own brands of madness about. And since he’s a decade younger than Jimmy & Dennis, this gives Sachs the choice opportunity to deliver one hell of a moment here where Vincent gets schooled on his ignorance of even his most immediate queer history—it feels similar to the way Gregg Araki used the age-gap affair at the heart of his latest I Want Your Sex to educate The Young People some, but a little less dogmatically, and far more affecting emotional-wise.

And that’s because the one acting this scene out is Tom Sturridge, who proves yet again here that he’s one of the most criminally underappreciated actors we have. It’s something substantial when someone can snatch attention away from Jake Gyllenhaal like Sturridge did to devastating effect with his Tony-nominated turn in the 2019 play Sea Wall / A Life (and a sidenote: that play was written by Simon Stephens, the director of Andrew Scott’s upcoming Oscar vehicle Elsinore which is about, that’s right, another gay artist dying of AIDS)—most especially when that’s coming from this movie critic here who has used the term “Gyllenhaalic” to describe himself with total, dumb seriousness. Which all is just to say that the presence of Tom Sturridge should have any person with taste sitting up and paying attention.

Unfortunately to date Sturridge’s screen career has felt like one of too many just-misses—pour one out for everyone involved in The Sandman who is not named Neil Gaiman—and too small roles—his sword-play and mustache nearly steal the lovely Far From the Madding Crowd remake). Which walking-in made Sachs finally giving the actor a film role to properly sink his teeth into feel like a rare and exquisite treat. And Sturridge wastes not a second becoming the broken, beating-red-blood heart of this movie—his Dennis is the necessary face of calm and collected, but only just, and only because he’s found himself forced into that box. But if you were dumb enough to tap at him just wrong a rage, an unbearable anguish, will peek through from just under the stillness. Which Vincent stupidly does, to his immediate regret (not to mention we the audience’s thrill and heartbreak). What a performance.

And so the world of The Man I Love has so very much to recommend it—it would be a delight if the film as a whole weren’t being weighed down from its center like a crime tied to a stone that’s been tossed into the Hudson River. Unfortunately the violent gravity of Malek’s missteps are too unwieldy to ignore. And, much like the story that Sachs is so fond of re-telling, The Man I Love can so easily morph into the man we hate.

The Man I Love is currently screening at the New York Film Festival.