Ira Sachs has been on an incredible career roll lately, with three consecutive features digging into the complex inner lives of gay men in distinctive ways, reaffirming the director’s position among the preeminent movie chroniclers of queer experience. Whether or not it’s intended, those three entries could be considered an unofficial trilogy. Sachs’ emotionally charged latest, The Man I Love, revolves around an unapologetically narcissistic lead character not unlike the Franz Rogowski role in 2023’s Passages and shares a fascination with bringing verbatim texts to life with last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day — in that case as a diaristic literary project, this time as performance art.
Without ever leaving its single apartment set except to step onto the terrace, Peter Hujar’s Day revealed not just the photographer but a time capsule of the downtown New York art scene in the mid 1970s, roughly speaking, the window between peak Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. The Man I Love skips forward a decade to the late ‘80s, shifting its gaze to the alternative theater and performance scene when stage companies like the Wooster Group were pushing boundaries and venues like the Pyramid Club were booking drag acts and post-punk bands.
