‘The Man I Love’ Review: Rami Malek Is Blazingly Alive In Ira Sachs’ Inspiring Movie Set Against AIDS Era And Downtown NYC’s Vibrant Artists Playground Of Late ’80s – Cannes Film Festival

Veteran filmmaker Ira Sachs returns to a place where his own creative spark was lit, the downtown New York City world where artists of all stripes (and sexualities) from experimental theater to painting to music to poetry and more could congregate and feed their need to create, even in the face of impending death and the spread of AIDS in the late 1980s. This was a place to be alive, no matter what the future might hold, a place to fulfill your own needs and do it on your own terms.

Sachs and his longtime writing partner Mauricio Zacharias have set their screenplay in this milieu for a movie set just as the AIDS crisis was taking so many young and vibrant lives of artists. But instead of focusing on the dark side as so many films and plays have done, this one celebrates the continuing desire to keep moving, to be unapologetically alive and energized to give all you have left to art.

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