Rami Malek Calls His New Role 'an Act of Defiance' — and It Might Be the Best Thing He's Ever Done

NEW YORK — THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2026 — Rami Malek walked onstage at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall on Thursday night and called his new role "an act of defiance" — then told the crowd that the performance some critics are already calling the best of his career almost didn't happen the way you'd expect. He'd just introduced "The Man I Love" — Ira Sachs's bittersweet drama about a dying performance artist in 1980s New York — to a New York Film Festival audience still catching its breath. "People often ask: After the accolades, is it a given that you can just walk into a film like this? It's not," he told the crowd. Then he explained why he fought for this one anyway.

01 The performance of his career — maybe

Let's get the big claim out of the way, because USA Today's critic made it without blinking: Malek delivers an "exquisite, career-best turn" as Jimmy George, a free-spirited performance artist preparing for one last show as he dies of AIDS. And the review goes further — according to the critic, his cover of Melanie's 1970 hit "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" inside the film "far surpasses anything Malek did as Freddie Mercury in 2018's 'Bohemian Rhapsody.'" Read that again. The Oscar-winning performance that made him famous is, in this telling, the warm-up act.

Not every critic is at full swoon. In Review Online's NYFF dispatch said Malek's twitchy, gestural physicality is absorbing at first and distancing at second glance — until Jimmy steps behind the safety of the fourth wall and performs, at which point Malek connects "on a more visceral level." That rings true to anyone who's seen Sachs work: his films live in the gap between the person and the performance. And in the musical numbers — a sweetly intimate dinner-party duet with Rebecca Hall, a languorous torch-song take on the Gershwins' "The Man I Love" at a bar — even the skeptics agree something breaks open.

02 Who these people are

Jimmy George is an actor and singer in 1980s New York, recently out of the hospital, rehearsing a gender-bending stage production and running out of time. Around him, Sachs has arranged a small, bruised constellation of love. Rebecca Hall plays Brenda, Jimmy's devoted sister — USA Today said she was luminous as she was in Sachs's last film "Peter Hujar's Day" — and gets to show off a gorgeous set of pipes herself.

Tom Sturridge is the film's quiet earthquake as Dennis, Jimmy's reliable long-term partner — a tender caregiver and devastating voice of reason who gets pushed to the background of Jimmy's exciting, bohemian lifestyle. USA Today calls him "a quiet knockout" and says his turn could draw awards attention down the line, and the festival reviews are piling on: the tenderness Dennis shows Jimmy is laced with grief, anger, and a bone-deep understanding that he knows exactly who he's with and stays anyway. Then there's Vincent, the eager, doe-eyed neighbor played by Luther Ford in a captivating big-screen debut, who turns Jimmy's last act into a love triangle with real stakes. Sachs co-wrote the film with longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias — their sixth feature together — and the intimacy of that partnership shows in every unhurried scene.

03 A love letter to a lost generation

This is familiar ground for cinema — the lost generation of gay men who contracted HIV in the late 1980s has been the subject of decades of art — and it's ground where it's easy to slip into either tragedy porn or saint-making. What's striking about the early response to "The Man I Love" is that multiple critics said Sachs dodged both traps. The film is, by multiple accounts, more about life than death: about rehearsals and parties and dinners and the stubborn insistence on making art with the time you have left. One TIFF review wrote that it was "a film about living while knowing that life can be taken away from you, and about how that knowledge can change the way a person treats the people closest to them." That's the whole movie in a sentence.

It matters that Sachs is telling it. This is a filmmaker whose entire career has been about queer intimacy at close range — "Love Is Strange," "Keep the Lights On," "Passages" — and about the ethics of watching people love each other when the world is hostile. Setting Jimmy's story in the downtown New York performance scene, with real songs and real sweat, makes it feel less like a history lesson and more like a transmission from a room that actually existed.

04 "An act of defiance"

The best moment of Thursday's Q&A wasn't about craft at all — it was Malek talking about why Jimmy got under his skin. He said he sat down with Sachs long before officially signing on, and the two of them built the character from the ground up. "I could really relate to him and wanting to make the best out of everything you have, knowing there's a finite time," Malek said. And then the line that will follow this film everywhere: he kept thinking of creativity and love and lust and joy as "almost an act of defiance" — "a powerful way of remaining present and enjoying life when the world was almost asking you to disappear."

That's a hell of a mission statement, and it reframes the whole film. This isn't a dying-man movie. It's a living-man movie — about the refusal to go quietly, about pleasure as protest. Sturridge, joining Malek onstage, put the film's central relationship in terms only a theater veteran could: a "grammar of intimacy" that long-term lovers speak with "fingers and eyes and ankles," developed the boring, simple way — "it's just time." Malek, for his part, told Sturridge he'd watched almost all of his plays, then described the moment they met in a London pub and Sturridge put his hand on his: "When you talk about chemistry, I was like, 'Oh, I'm in great hands.'"

05 The strange business of having no distributor

Here's the part that should make you a little furious: after a lauded Cannes premiere in May, a standing ovation, an NYFF bow, and reviews calling it a career-best performance from an Oscar winner — "The Man I Love" still doesn't have U.S. distribution. Nobody has bought it yet. This is the indie film economy in 2026: a movie can be one of the most acclaimed titles at two major festivals and still be, essentially, homeless, waiting for a streamer or specialty label to decide it's worth the marketing spend.

That will change — films with this kind of heat don't stay orphaned long, and the awards chatter around Sturridge alone will bring buyers to the table. But it's worth sitting with the absurdity for a second. The system that greenlights everything with a cape on it can't find room for Rami Malek's best performance. For more on the films fighting for attention this season, check out A24's Anthony Bourdain biopic with Dominic Sessa and our weekend streaming guide for October 9.