Ira Sachs has been on an incredible career roll lately, with three consecutive features digging into the complex inner lives of gay men in distinctive ways, reaffirming the director’s position among the preeminent movie chroniclers of queer experience. Whether or not it’s intended, those three entries could be considered an unofficial trilogy. Sachs’ emotionally charged latest, The Man I Love, revolves around an unapologetically narcissistic lead character not unlike the Franz Rogowski role in 2023’s Passages and shares a fascination with bringing verbatim texts to life with last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day — in that case as a diaristic literary project, this time as performance art.

Without ever leaving its single apartment set except to step onto the terrace, Peter Hujar’s Day revealed not just the photographer but a time capsule of the downtown New York art scene in the mid 1970s, roughly speaking, the window between peak Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. The Man I Love skips forward a decade to the late ‘80s, shifting its gaze to the alternative theater and performance scene when stage companies like the Wooster Group were pushing boundaries and venues like the Pyramid Club were booking drag acts and post-punk bands.

Rami Malek is transformative as Jimmy George, a downtown theater artist with a fictional experimental group called The Mechanicals. He seems as famous for his louche charms as his stage acts and has been throwing himself into rehearsals for a new piece following a period of hospitalization with AIDS-related illness. 

That project is a word-for-word recreation of a forgotten French-Canadian queer film from 1974, called Once Upon a Time in the East. It follows a day-in-the-life of a group of marginalized Montreal outsiders that includes a toughened singer named Carmen, to be played by Jimmy in drag with a blond wig. Sachs describes the original film: “As if Altman’s Nashville had been made by Fassbinder.”

The fractious but communal atmosphere of rehearsals spills over into Jimmy’s homelife, in an apartment that frequently becomes a sort of salon for his close-knit circle. A party at which guests go around the table, each of them singing a song in an eclectic mix, seems precisely the kind of gathering that is Jimmy’s lifeblood. 

He lives with longterm boyfriend Dennis (Tom Sturridge), who provides stability, loyalty and care, making sure Jimmy eats and organizing his meds. A ravishing moment early on in which their arms seek out each other at the dining table, tracing body contours they know as well as their own, is quintessential Sachs, the rare American filmmaker completely unselfconscious in his depiction of queer sex and sensuality as a shared language.

While the movie belongs to Malek — who makes Jimmy both languorous and revitalized by creativity, weakened by declining health but hurling himself with ferocious tenacity into whatever life he has left — Sturridge is the stealth MVP. With an impressive economy of means, the actor gets at something fundamental to the relationship between artists and their partners, comfortably occupying the tight spaces left available by a magnetic man who sucks up most of the oxygen in a room without even trying. Dennis is a character not given to big emotional displays, but I found Sturridge’s performance ineffably moving.

When their downstairs neighbor Leslie (Maisy Stella) introduces them to her new Brit roommate Vincent (Luther Ford), he is instantly drawn to Jimmy and his whole Bohemian aura. For Jimmy, the high of having an attractive young man intoxicated by him provides another opportunity to tighten his hold on life, making it inevitable that they start sleeping together. 

It’s assumed but unsaid that the relationship between Jimmy and Dennis is — or at least in the past was — a somewhat open one. Still the flickers of hurt that register on Sturridge’s face and Dennis’ prickliness around Vincent, who suddenly seems to be always there, hovering around the edges, feed the movie’s rich vein of melancholy.

That aspect also comes from Rebecca Hall’s deeply felt performance (her second colaboration with Sachs, following Peter Hujar’s Day) as Jimmy’s loving sister Brenda. When she comes to town for a visit with her husband Gene (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and their preteen son Billy (Dennis Courtis), her closeness with her brother is immediately evident. 

One scene —  after Gene offers to accompany Billy back to the hotel late at night so Brenda can enjoy herself with Jimmy — takes the siblings to a fabulous drag bar. It casually shows the magnetic pull that Jimmy and his extended family have on Brenda and the different life she might have led had she made other choices.

(The needle drops in this movie are impeccable; I swear I let out an involuntary whimper of delight when they enter the club to Shirley Ellis’ “Clapping Song” and DP Josée Deshaies gets in close to drag queens bedecked in thrift-store glamour shaking their asses with self-celebratory abandon. The sensual pleasure of dancing is a gorgeous motif.)

Misinformed reports circulated while Sachs was in production indicating that The Man I Love was to be a musical. That was never the case, though the handful of vocal interludes are an integral part of the movie’s graceful flow, edited by longtime collaborator Affonso Gonçalves, who has been working with Sachs for more than 20 years. 

The title song is featured when the club’s drag emcee invites Jimmy up on stage to deliver a lovely, wistful rendition of the Gershwin standard. But even more affecting than that torchy number is Jimmy’s performance, accompanying himself on accoustic guitar at his parents’ wedding anniversary party (to which Dennis was not invited), of folk-pop goddess Melanie’s 1970 hit, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.”

In another standout scene, the afterglow of that evening with her brother fades abruptly when Brenda gets back to the hotel and tells Gene how happy she is to see Jimmy almost back to his old self. Moss-Bachrach plays the husband as the soul of kindness and supportiveness, though Gene is also a pragmatist, reminding his wife that Jimmy’s health won’t stay that way. There’s no callousness in his words, just a far-sighted urge to prepare his wife for the crushing loss ahead. Likewise, his son, who adores Uncle Jimmy.

Probably the film’s most funny-sad scene is a monologue exquisitely shaped by Sachs and his regular co-writer Mauricio Zacharias in which Jimmy asks Billy to shoot a video of him (the camera was a gift from his uncle) as an anniversary message for his parents. 

It starts out as an acknowledgment of all they have done for him, though soon pivots into an unburdening of all the lies he told them and his adventures with alcohol, drugs and sex, not stinting on the details. When Gene overhears the gist of what his impressionable son is recording, he can’t get the boy out of the room fast enough. 

Having moved to New York City around the time the movie is set, Sachs clearly has a personal investment in lives like those of Jimmy and Dennis and even the selfish faux-innocent Vincent. That third point of the love triangle is played with the dreamy invulnerability of youth and a refusal to consider consequences by talented newcomer Ford. 

A scene in which Dennis verbally lays into Jimmy’s new lover about treating it all like a game is one of relatively few examples of major dramatic fireworks and all the more hard-hitting for it. Vincent’s sputtering self-justification that Jimmy is alive and he’s an artist who wants to fall in love — “He wants to fall in love with me” — leaves Dennis, who has witnessed his partner near death, speechless. A later scene played by Sturridge with raw exposed nerves at the hospital crushed me, as did a tender moment when Dennis bathes Jimmy.

Sachs has not made an AIDS movie we’ve seen a million times, largely because it’s not so much a movie about death as one about wringing every last drop out of life, whether it’s fuel for creativity, love or one last surge of passion and pleasure. That said, Malek’s performance as Jimmy approaches the end is the best work he’s ever done — one scene, in particular, is a heart-stopper that will remind many viewers of a classic similar scene with Ronee Blakley in Nashville.

As if picking up on that cue, the movie closes with Blakley’s song “Lightning Over Water,” from the film of the same name co-directed by her then-husband Wim Wenders with Nicholas Ray. Anyone who knows the singer only from her twangy country tunes in the Altman film will be startled by her electrifying vocal performance, building through a spoken-word opening with the cadences of a beat poem to exhilarating full force in a crescendo where she sounds like Patti Smith and Grace Slick rolled into one. 

It’s hard to imagine a song that more clearly evokes someone clutching onto one life with resilient defiance, attempting to delay as long as possible the inevitable migration into the next. It goes instantly into my running list of all-time great outro choices.