The Man I Love

Jimmy George does not want to die. Not as long as there is still a role waiting for him, at any rate. In the late 1980s the actor is a dazzling figure of New York’s queer scene. He has survived an AIDS-related pneumonia, but instead of taking it easy, he gathers his theatre friends: together they want to bring the queer film “Once Upon a Time in the East” to the stage. Jimmy plays the singer Carmen, in drag, full of defiance and zest for life. His partner Dennis looks after him, but Jimmy, almost defiantly, falls for the young neighbour Vincent. Everyone looks after Jimmy, knowing that he does not have much time left. Only Jimmy seems unwilling to admit it.

Director Ira Sachs knows the milieu he shows in this pleasantly unhurried film. These New York apartments where people rehearse, dance, quarrel and love; Sachs himself lived through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Out of these complex memories, “The Man I Love” becomes no simple illness drama but a tender miniature about dying. Rami Malek plays Jimmy with a wild, almost immoderate devotion, as if art could transform any moment into something eternal. “The Man I Love” tells of the artists’ great, beautiful illusion: that art itself knows more time than our short lives.