Drama film The Man I Love, recovery from illness with Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall - plot

Plot of The Man I Love: love, art, and AIDS in 1980s New York

The Man I Love is an upcoming romance and drama movie. Set in late 1980s New York, it tells the story of Jimmy George (Rami Malek), a performance artist from downtown New York. Jimmy has just survived a hospital stay for pneumonia related to AIDS, and his partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) helps him face the challenges of recovery.

When Jimmy meets Vincent (Luther Ford), a carefree young man attracted to Jimmy, the balance changes. Meanwhile, Jimmy is rehearsing a new show with his experimental theater company The Mechanicals, a word-for-word recreation of a forgotten 1974 Franco-Canadian queer movie, Once Upon a Time in the East, where he plays Carmen, a drag character with a blonde wig.

Cast of The Man I Love: Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, and Rebecca Hall

Rami Malek won the Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody, and recently starred in the thriller The Amateur and in Nuremberg.

Tom Sturridge is an actor in the TV series The Sandman and in the movie The Wizard of the Kremlin.

Luther Ford is making his film debut after playing the young Prince Harry in the series The Crown and acting in Black Doves.

Rebecca Hall, recently seen in the movie Peter Hujar’s Day by the same Sachs, plays Brenda, Jimmy’s sister, while Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Emmy winner for The Bear and lead in the movie The Fantastic Four: First Steps, has the role of the husband Gene.

Ira Sachs directs The Man I Love

The direction is by Ira Sachs, who has already directed Passages and Peter Hujar’s Day.

He stated that it took fifteen years for him and his writing partner Mauricio Zacharias to create the movie’s story, inspired by Van Gogh by Maurice Pialat.

"It is about the last months of Van Gogh’s life when his death was imminent," Sachs explained. "But in that period, he lived and chose to live with such commitment to creating art, as well as to the experience of pleasure. That was the kind of movie Mauricio and I decided to write: one where death is present, but in reality no one actively dies; they live actively. What the movie had to be was abundance, not disappearance."

Reviews of The Man I Love at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

The movie was presented at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, receiving positive reviews.

For TheWrap, "in Sachs’ spectacular and shocking vision, written in collaboration with his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, we witness the stories and memories that we can only hope our loved ones will tell us about ourselves when we are no longer here."

For The Guardian, "there are beautiful moments in this movie (...) Malek’s declamation of an excerpt from Saint Crispin’s speech from Henry V towards the end of the movie is full of verve, better in many ways than any other of his performances. It is an honest movie, both in intent and conception, but the lead’s performance, somewhat disconcerting and forced, feels out of place."

For Variety, "it is an unusually touching drama, small, delicate, and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that, if justice exists, should finally silence all the critics who have always been so sarcastic towards him."

Production and filming of The Man I Love

The production is by Big Creek Projects, Assemble Media, Merino Films, and SBS Productions. Filming took place entirely in New York, in September 2025.