Rami Malek makes Cannes debut with intimate AIDS drama

Rami Malek’s first trip to Cannes ended with a long ovation for The Man I Love, a competition entry that places AIDS-era New York back at the center of mainstream cinema. The world premiere on May 20 brought together Malek, Ira Sachs and a festival audience that responded with roughly eight to 10 minutes of applause, a reaction that suggested the film is landing as more than awards-season prestige.

Set in late 1980s New York, the film follows Jimmy George, played by Malek, an iconic theater figure who has recently come back from hospitalization tied to HIV/AIDS complications. Official Cannes materials describe the project as a “musical fantasy in a city in crisis,” and the story frames Jimmy’s desire to keep living, creating, desiring and loving as the threat of death closes in. Tom Sturridge plays Dennis, Rebecca Hall plays Brenda and Ebon Moss-Bachrach is also in the cast, with Jimmy’s partner and sister remaining protective as a new neighbor becomes infatuated with him.

That setup gives the film a clear historical charge. New York City was among the U.S. cities hit hardest by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and Sachs has said the project drew on his own late-1980s New York experience, when AIDS was affecting people close to him. In that sense, the film reaches beyond period detail and into the cultural memory of a crisis that was often met with fear, silence and stigma.

For Cannes, the film also carried institutional weight. The festival’s 79th edition ran from May 12 to 23, 2026, and The Man I Love was the sole American feature in the competition lineup. The official festival page credited Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias, while industry coverage noted that Sachs had last competed in Cannes with Frankie in 2019. The film has also been mentioned in the Queer Palm conversation, a reminder that Cannes still uses side prizes to signal which stories speak most directly to LGBTQIA+ life and history.

For Malek, the premiere marked a new kind of milestone. Already an Oscar winner for Bohemian Rhapsody and an Emmy winner for Mr. Robot, he told Reuters that being at Cannes for the first time in his life felt like a “pinch-yourself moment.” His role here appears designed to show a different register than the one that made him famous: less imitation, more vulnerability, and a performance anchored in the precariousness of body, art and desire. In a festival crowded with prestige titles, Sachs’ film asked whether memory can still feel urgent when the epidemic it depicts belongs to another decade, and the answer from Cannes was immediate.