Rami Malek and filmmaker Ira Sachs are teaming up on “The Man I Love,” a musical fantasia premiering in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. We now have our first-look images, courtesy of THR. It’s basically a puff piece, one that positions Malek’s performance as potentially Oscar worthy.
Set in late-1980s New York during the AIDS crisis, the film follows Jimmy George, an artist and actor confronting mortality while still searching for creative purpose. The supporting cast includes Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Tom Sturridge, with the film presenting New York as both “glamorous” and “haunted.”
Malek — an Oscar winner — saw the role as an opportunity to move away from more conventional projects and reconnect with emotionally vulnerable material. Sachs describes the movie as blending music, romance, fantasy, and tragedy into a portrait of artists living under the shadow of illness and loss.
There is also, very well intended, mention that industry observers already see this film as a possible comeback vehicle for Malek, who, after winning the Oscar for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” has been in an Adrien Brody-like artistic funk. The Oscar “curse” is real for some actors; ever since winning his golden statuette in 2019, Malek has starred in “Dolittle,” “The Little Things,” “Amsterdam,” “No Time to Die,” and “The Amateur.” On a slightly more positive note, he had a very small role in “Oppenheimer.”
This seems to be an unusually ambitious project for Sachs, whose earlier films built a reputation for intimate storytelling. Sachs has been a mainstay of American indie cinema for over two decades now. After early promise with “The Delta” (1997), his breakthrough came a decade and a half later with a trio of intimate New York dramas: “Keep the Lights On” (2012), “Love Is Strange” (2014), and “Little Men” (2016). Things wobbled a bit with 2019’s “Frankie,” a limp Isabelle Huppert vehicle that played Cannes to shrugs. However, he rebounded with “Passages” (2023), a thorny Paris-set love triangle that became one of his most acclaimed works.
The overall tone of the THR piece is trying to tell us that Cannes could become a turning point both for Sachs’ and for Malek’s career trajectory. Although that remains to be seen, “The Man I Love” is one of only two U.S. films in competition this year, so more attention will inevitably be given to Sachs’ film.
