When the right actor has lucked into exactly the right role, a role that not only fits like a glove but serves as a kind of spiritual-emotional springboard that instantly ups the actor’s game, you can sense it within a couple of minutes.
There was never the slightest question that Rami Malek‘s crackling, pocket-drop performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (released seven and a half years ago…time flies!) was one such performance.
Last night I got the same…actually an even bigger snap-crackle-pop from Malek’s quieter, less flamboyant but ultra-delicate and vulnerable performance as gay cabaret performer Jimmy George in Ira Sachs‘ The Man I Love, which I caught at 10 pm in the Salle Debussy.
I’ll be flabbergasted if the Cannes Film Festival jury doesn’t hand Malek the Best Actor prize on Saturday night. And you can bet the farm and your savings account that Malek will be Oscar-nominated next January. It’s obvious. He’s uncorked one here. Malek is James Dean riding his sloppy jalopy over to Reata, hopping out, spreading his arms and taunting Rock Hudson with “my well came in, Vic.”
Will the same critics who sneered at Bohemian Rhapsody while implying that Malek’s Mercury was “some sort of weird crime against humanity”, as Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote yesterday…will these same critics take fresh shots at the seemingly straight Malek (he merged with Rhapsody costar Lucy Boynton between 2017 to ’23, and then with Emma Corrin from 2023 to ’25) for not having the “authority” to play a theatrically queenish devotee of singing and cabaret crooning?
Remember Tom Hanks saying four years ago that he could not play the role of a gay man as he did in 1993’s Philadelphia, and “rightly so”?
But let’s not go off the Malek-y deep end here. For in and of itself The Man I Love, in its emotional and atmospheric totality, is a fascinating, plainly told and fundamentally riveting story of Jimmy’s declining life in late ’80s Manhattan…gradually losing his grip but impulsively joyful and instinctually rebellious, and randomly moody from time to time.
You can feel the directness, the docudrama-like spareness, the no-bullshit honesty from the get-go. This, for me, is Sachs’ best film ever. I’ve never been a big fan of his sometimes deft approach — I frankly didn’t think Sachs was capable of this kind of frank, improv-style filmmaking.
Sustained in part by AZT, which was officially approved in ’87, Jimmy’s tenuous, AIDS-afflicted life is split between rehearsals for his latest show at some lower Manhattan venue, his longterm relationship with the devoted and protective Dennis (perfectly played by Tom Sturridge, who’s also straight…uh-oh!) and a young, carrot-haired, alabaster-skinned sexual vampire named Vincent (Luther Ford) who obviously decides from the very first story beat that he wants to fuck Jimmy and possibly fall in love…love me love me or at least fuck me fuck me cum jism hot-shower anal squishitude and a men’s room quickie…bip bip bip bip.
Rebecca Hall is excellent as Jimmy’s sister Brenda, who’s visiting Manhattan for a brief spell with her bearish husband, Gene (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, the restaurant manager in The Bear). Silent HE muttering: “Jeez, what self-respecting woman would want to fuck that guy with his bushy beard and all?”
In my Debussy mind the flame-haired Vincent wasn’t just a carniverous slut but some kind of supreme villain…a crocodile looking to eat a nice succulent wildebeest during a major herd crossing…and Dennis is Pat O’Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces. Given this analogy, I was kind of hoping that Vincent would turn out to be James Cagney‘s doomed Rocky Sullivan, but he’s cool and collected in the final shot, sipping a drink at a bar and then writhing on a dance floor with his latest victim, an aspiring, dark-haired actor.
I felt mildly satisfied when Jimmy zones out on Vincent, prompting the latter to ask “what did I do?…Jimmy, what did I do?” But it wasn’t enough.
The mid to late 30ish (or early 40ish) Jimmy is a bit of a sad sack…a personality-driven performer who tasted a potential launch moment in his 20s, but then somehow let the chance slip away. He’s clearly a deeply committed artist with a knack or a flair for turning audiences on, but starting to be hobbled by second thoughts or late-surfacing health tremors. He has the swagger and the confidence of someone who’s been performing for a longish period, but not quite possessing the explosive energy and diamond-cut panache of a serious A-level talent. Inwardly he’s coming apart at the seams, and this, sadly, leaks out on opening night.
I agree with other Cannes critics that The Man I Love‘s big moment arrives when Jimmy, at some kind of gathering for his parents, picks up a mike and gently sings “What Have They Done to My Song Ma”, the 1970 Melanie song. Coming from Jimmy, the lyric about how “it’s turning out all wrong, ma”…you know what he’s sorry about, and it catches you in the throat.
The period tip-offs are a mention of club performer Ann Magnuson, who started to happen in certain downtown venues (Club 57, Mudd Club) in ’89 and ’90, and a Sony 8mm cassette video camera that I captured my two infant sons with during the same period. And Jimmy’s confession to a doctor that he was born in 1947.