The director Ira Sachs has built an oeuvre chronicling queer intimacy. His 2023 film Passages was about a gay marriage ended by an affair, and two years later, with Peter Hujar’s Day, he brought the trailblazing photographer Peter Hujar to the screen. The Man I Love is the newest entry in this canon, and the most personal. The film centers on the downtown actor Jimmy George (Rami Malek) and his attempt to perform in one last theater production, even though he is dying from complications of AIDS. Sachs witnessed such perseverance firsthand in the 1980s. “It created an intense atmosphere of both dread and possibility in New York,” Sachs said of living during the epidemic. “I made a film that’s a testament to creativity as a form of survival.” The Man I Love frames the historical period not as tragedy, but as an era full of pleasure, vitality, and above all, community. This Friday, the film closes out the 38th New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival. —Maggie Turner