Rami Malek explores art, love and death in Ira Sachs’ Cannes entry ‘The Man I Love’

CANNES, France — In Ira Sachs’ 1980s-set drama “The Man I Love,” Rami Malek finds the most well-tailored role since his Oscar-winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

While Sachs’ film, which is a competition entry at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, likewise centers on a performer dying of AIDS, it’s otherwise an altogether different and dramatically more personal tale about art, love and death.

“It took me a minute to realize it was more about life,” Malek said in an interview alongside Sachs on a terrace in Cannes. “There’s a threat looming throughout, but it’s an undercurrent. Throughout the film there’s a cacophony of sound and imagery and beauty that is filling your soul.”

The film, which is for sale in Cannes, has earned Malek — an actor who has sometimes struggled to find well-suited roles since his breakout in “Mr. Robot” — some of the best reviews of his career.

Sachs, the New York indie filmmaker of “Passages” and “Love Is Strange,” knew he wanted an actor with an ineffable star quality.

“What I saw in ‘Mr. Robot’ was a very natural actor and someone who has an ability where you don’t know how they get from one word to the next.”

In “The Man I Love,” Malek plays Jimmy George, a New York performance artist who’s trying to continue performing despite his illness. His partner (Tom Sturridge) diligently cares for him while a man (Luke Ford) who moves into the same building immediately falls for Jimmy.

It’s not a movie filled with medication and hospital visits. Instead, it captures a performer desperately trying to continue on.

Sachs said he wanted “a rapturous film.”

“I wanted to make a film that contained all the things that I’ll miss when I’m gone,” said the filmmaker. “I wanted it to be suffused with emotion and pain and skin. It’s a sexy film. It has color and music. You could say it’s a list of pleasures or sins.”

Some of the movie’s most overwhelming scenes are of Jimmy rehearsing or performing. In a heartbreaking showstopper, he sings the 1970 Melanie hit “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” to his family.

“It came straight from my soul,” says Malek. “It’s a moment in the film when Jimmy has some sense of clarity as to what’s coming. There is this stubborn refusal to keep creating in the most desperate of times that emanates through this film. It imbued me with this sense of, ‘Oh, I can be dangerous. I can take things to a limit that I haven’t before.’”

The 1980s has deep importance to the 60-year-old Sachs, who began working in New York in 1984. He was inspired by the stories of performance artists like John Kelly and John Jesurun

“They’re the ones who told me about the last night that the comedian Frank Maya was on stage and he lost the ability to finish his act,” Sachs says. “John Kelly told me about Ethyl Eichelberger performing and having sweat drenching his face.”

Malek calls Sachs “a library,” whose connection to the time of “The Man I Love” fueled his curiosity.”.

“That confidence generated a performance in me that I didn’t know I was giving,” Malek says. “But I knew I was doing something unique. I didn’t know it would translate.”