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.
