Ira Sachs’s “The Man I Love” is a stirringly offbeat drama, small and delicate and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that, if there’s any justice, should finally quiet down all the reviewers who’ve always been so snarky about him. This actor has been a critical whipping boy ever since “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), which somehow became — at least, in the eyes of too much of the media — not a zesty, enjoyable, and flawed rock biopic but some sort of weird crime against humanity. Sorry, but it was a highly watchable movie, and Malek’s arresting authenticity as Freddie Mercury is what took you through it.
That said, he’s a tough actor to cast, and in “The Man I Love” Malek takes a break from his post-“Bohemian” run of impersonating cops and spies and Nazi interrogators; he has finally found a role exquisitely tailored to his talents. Set in the late 1980s, the movie is a New York micro-drama about a fellow named Jimmy George — an amateur performance artist who is battling AIDS, keeping the illness at bay with AZT. The film takes place not too long after he spent time in the hospital with a case of pneumonia that nearly did him in. But now he has recovered.
In “The Man I Love,” we watch Jimmy pull together his latest makeshift theater piece (which might be described as off off off Off Broadway). We watch him sing songs in other contexts (like his parents’ anniversary). We observe the loving devotion with which Dennis (Tom Sturridge), the partner who moved in in order to take care of him, does so. We also see him commence a hot fling with a man who lives in the same apartment building — an ardent young British fellow, Vincent (Luke Ford), who’s utterly infatuated with Jimmy.
If Jimmy were more of a superstar in the making, “The Man I Love” might actually be less interesting. In fact, he seems like an aspiring Warhol Superstar who came along a decade too late. He’s an aging party boy with talent, and the desire to perform, but he’s like any number of the effusive gay men you might have seen in New York at the time, in the cabarets of the West Village or other venues of the downtown scene. Jimmy, like them, has the artist’s need to express himself, fueled by a primal desire to be seen, but not in a way that makes him destined for major success. Performing in the gay demimonde, he’s a medium-size exhibitionist in an oversize pond.
Malek colors him in with shades of anger, tenderness, psychosis, and the sheer pesky individuality of Jimmy. He makes him a morosely charismatic flake — the kind of flamboyant narcissist who’s got a gift, but one he doesn’t quite know what to do with. Jimmy sings…well enough. (Early on, when he performs “The Man I Love,” he sounds a little slurry, like late-period Judy Garland, which isn’t necessarily something to aspire to.) He turns inhabiting a woman’s vibe into a science, which he explains during a party, when he struts around before everyone in the living room, rolling each part of his body with a feminine “figure eight.” He’s been on the drag-show circuit, where there’s a lot of talent but also a lot of wannabe spirit infused with more passion than genius. And Jimmy has been doing it all for long enough that he’s a legend in his own mind, and maybe the minds of a few others. But now he’s fading from the world.
A film director, like a musician, can occasionally produce a work that ends up influencing himself in a fascinating way. Ira Sachs’s last film, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” was a winning experiment: essentially a feature-length monologue, based on a real tape recording, in which the photographer Peter Hujar (played by Ben Whishaw) talked about everything he did the day before, from the most casual triviality to the most meaningful event. It was a lovely Zen wisp of a film, a playful act of transcendental memory.
Sachs, following up on the spirit of that film, has conceived “The Man I Love” as though he were making a documentary about a fictional person. The characters don’t declaim the dialogue, even in an indie-movie way — they mumble and murmur it, as if they were being observed on the sly. The period detail is there, but understated. And though the film, when you stand back, has a beautifully organic shape, on a scene-to-scene level it’s cut together with a jarring lifelike randomness. Sachs doesn’t want tidy resolutions or tidy scenes; he wants flow and spontaneity and spiky looseness. He’s hardly the first director to go in that direction (hello, John Cassavetes and Robert Altman and Richard Linklater), but he does it with his own tiny-is-big, the-world-lives-in-a-moment aesthetic.
Jimmy wants to create a performance piece that’s got a postmodern sting. The one he has put together is a re-creation of a rehearsal from the oddball 1974 French Canadian queer film “Il Etait un Fois Dans L’Est,” which features a diva named Carmen, who we see in video clips on the TV. She’s like a low-rent Carol Channing, and half the rehearsal is her berating her musicians. But that’s part of what Jimmy wants to re-create. He’s trying to duplicate the purity of a shambolic performance, and as his health begins to deteriorate, and his mind along with it, he’s going to be true to that performance in more ways than he knows.
Malek, with an insular and crestfallen moodiness, plays Jimmy as a man caught between liberation and AIDS, between wanting to be a breakout performer and waiting to stay true to his subversive drag soul. When his sister, Brenda (Rebecca Hall), brings her family over to visit him, there’s no Sturm und Drang (as there is with his parents, who are mired in old prejudices); they’re there to support him. Yet when it comes to romantic love, Jimmy’s support system is fragile. Malek delivers a riveting confessional speech about Jimmy’s sex life that is pure raunch poetry (“I cornholed anything that bent over”), and while Jimmy make no apologies for who he is, the energy of that lifestyle has left him in a lurch. It’s hard, at moments, to separate the mental decline Jimmy is suffering as a result of AIDS from his spiritual depletion. When he finally gets up onstage for the show’s opening night, what he gives is less a performance than a breakdown.
Yet there’s another scene in “The Man I Love” — it’s the film’s surprise emotional highlight — when Jimmy, at the gathering for his parents, sits in front of a backup band and sings the 1970 Melanie hit “What Have They Done to My Song Ma.” It’s a song that I heard all the time growing up, and one that I never thought twice about; the lyrics always struck me as corny (“Well, it’s the only thing that I could do half right/And it’s turning out all wrong, ma”). But maybe the song was meant to be sung by Jimmy George, because the way Rami Malek performs it, he charges it with the sadness and defiance of a lifetime. Watching the scene, you realize what the world has done to Jimmy’s song: It has stopped hearing it. But in “The Man I Love,” that song rings out like an angel’s lament.
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