popsublime

The only film by Ira Sachs that I’ve enjoyed on every level was Love Is Strange from 2014. None of the last few have thrilled me much at all, though I do remember liking his debut feature film The Delta thirty years ago now back in 1996. The Man I Love is an odd movie, and I had a feeling before watching it that it would be. What’s the point in 2026 of making a nostalgic film about AIDS? I had hoped that it might work, but it never fully cohered for me, and I came away from it not caring all about the characters. There’s something strangely mannered about the film’s style, and that came through most at the points when the film would have benefitted from being more unmannered. The interiors are so carefully appointed for a story about gay New York City artists, none of whom seem like their surroundings would have been realistic for them, at least not in those days.

Rami Malek stars as theatre actor Jimmy George, around whom the AIDS storyline revolves. He has one good monologue about his unhinged years of rampant sex and drugs, but I’m not so sure what attracted him to this project otherwise. He’s pleasing to watch in it (when he’s not excruciatingly weird, which also arises), snappily dressed in cute attire that’s designed to seem vintage. Malek can be so cartoonish-looking that it’s easy to forget what a classically handsome face he has when it’s filmed just right, often when he’s in repose and therefore not tampering with the vibe. His smaller, slighter build belies the handsome squareness of his head and jawline, so that when he’s in drag in an ornate pink blouse and platinum blonde wig in some scenes (in a theatrical subplot that makes no real sense whatsoever), it only serves as a reminder that his face is too masculine to be suitable for drag. A few scenes in which he’s more unhinged threw into question for me whether his Oscar for portraying Freddie Mercury may have been a bit of a fluke.

The supporting players are fine overall: Tom Sturridge as Jimmy’s boyfriend Dennis, Luther Ford as Jimmy’s red-headed side piece Vincent, and Rebecca Hall as Jimmy’s sister Brenda. While they all seemingly care about Jimmy’s plight, there’s also not quite enough at play to truly connect the characters fruitfully, nor to make them more individually distinguished. The movie kind of ambles along fairly aimlessly, drifting along on what I’m sure Ira Sachs intended to seem both referential and reverential. Social media certainly doesn’t help with very much, but occasionally seeing Ira Sachs’ posts on Instagram pop up on my phone screen made it clear that he's serious about his reading and viewing, both historically and aesthetically, though I feel like that’s a bit of a dead end in most of his movies. I liked the playful gay imagery and attitudes that kept me attentive during the first half of The Man I Love, but the film reached no real sense of resolution or even engagement for me, ultimately.

Which is why I sat there thinking instead about all of the movies that haven’t really worked for me this year in so many ways. I recently saw a comment by a famous director that kept floating through my mind while I was watching the second half of the film. He said not all films are art, fortunately, nor does he expect them to be, mainly because it’s important as a film director to study closely all of the movies that fail, in order to learn as much from them as the movies that manage to achieve some sort of seamlessness or even apparent perfection. But anybody who says that clearly hasn’t been writing movies reviews of cinematic releases and watching nearly all of the theatrical releases each year for any duration of time. There’s so much wasted time and money out there these days, both for the filmmakers and the audience members. It’s begun to make me wonder why anybody would pour so much energy and effort into getting a film made, when so many films lately are just not quite delivering the goods. The cartoonish cuteness of Rami Malek playing gay (and Tom Sturridge doing the same), while enough to keep my attention for at least a portion of the movie, started to matter less without a stronger narrative backbone. That the characters should be in such comfortable environments at such an uncomfortable time in gay male history back in the 1980s only added to my confusion about how and why they were living that way, rather than fortifying what might actually have made them worth following, relating to, and empathizing with.

Sunday, October 25, 2026

Coward (dir. Lukas Dhont, 2026)

I remember when a lesbian friend of mine said, “No more movies about war.” Her point-of-view is understandable. Men have ongoingly made a mess of history and human lives, basically out of a confrontational inability to solve problems through peacemaking. But obviously, there will never not be movies about war, and the young gay Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont has made a memorable and commendable one with Coward, a deft exploration of militarism and masculinity on the Belgian front during WWI in 1916. His cast of actors are as all-in as the casts of other war-themed films like Saving Private Ryan and Platoon, yet the touch of a gay director makes Coward feel quite different from those masterpieces. The film’s cinematography is often ravishing, especially when portraying affection and intimacy between the young male soldiers, even when what we’re seeing on screen is appropriately brutal and gruesome. That dichotomy proves harder and harder to shake as the storyline progresses, and as the handful of soldiers who remain alive and uninjured band together as a makeshift theatrical troupe to entertain their wounded comrades who’ve been far less fortunate.

Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) is our focal point and sensitive hero. He falls hesitantly in love with Francis (Valentin Campagne), a halting romance that’s portrayed carefully by the two actors, as if to suggest that the two young men, driven by impulse and circumstance, don’t quite fully comprehend what’s happening to them in their shared process of falling for one another. This seems like a realistic move to me. Homosexual though they might be, many soldiers worldwide found themselves in such situations throughout the 20^th century, particularly in WWI and WWII, when the wars took them away from often rural homescapes and towards their close encounters with each others in cities and ports all around the world. Some gay male historians have even posited that WWII set the very notion of gay male identity into motion in that way, hence the popular notion of gay and bisexual (and straight and curious) sailors who’d come ashore and gather in what came to be among the first gay bars and clubs in many locations globally.

Our hope for everything to work out fine for Pierre and Francis, despite the mass deaths and daily upheavals that surround them as soldiers in wartime, is mainly what drives the film and maintains the audience’s interest. They share a folded note with a simple line-drawing of a mountain where they plan to meet and shack up together in seclusion (either after the war has ended or after they both go AWOL), in a clear-eyed nod to Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. That encompassing focus on the relationship between Pierre and Francis in Coward highlights the deep strengths of both actors’ performances, while also drawing attention to some slight awkwardness in the characterizations at time, as though the actors (who might as well have previously been models) aren’t always totally certain how to telegraph certain emotional responses. I felt that same awkwardness a bit in Lukas Dhont’s previous film, Close, though the youth of the two actors in that film as young boys may have added more obviously to that very uncertainty. Perhaps it’s a very minor directorial glitch, or perhaps it lies wholly on the acting side. I even wonder if there’s something about masculinity and gay life in Belgian culture that I’m just unfamiliar with, which I’m reading as awkwardness on occasion? A discomfort with being gay in earlier historical periods is what gets underscored, even if that potentially stereotypical stance is presented with plenty of self-awareness and mostly with artistic prowess, both in Coward and in Close.

What sets Lukas Dhont’s films apart is how they very deliberate approach themes of masculinity (and broken masculinity) with a true sense of revelatory care. Male bodies are filmed with a tenderness and aesthetic investment in his movies, which very few of his contemporaries can achieve. Coward most brought to mind Claire Denis’ masterpiece Beau Travail, for instance, a comparison which makes it clear that Lukas Dhont is in it for the seriousness of the cinematic and directorial game, and at just age 35 now, he’s also clearly in it for the long haul.

Saturday, October 24, 2026

Club Kid (dir. Jordan Firstman, 2026)

I’m sure I was born to be the one dissenting voice about Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, his directorial debut. Mainly because I don’t need a gay formula film, although my objections go deeper than that. It’s not poorly made. The pace and tonal shifts are admirable. But its premise isn’t. Strung-out club promoter Peter Green (Firstman himself) discovers that he unknowingly sired a son with the only woman whose vagina his gay penis had ever entered (because that happens all the time). Ten years later Arlo (Reggie Absolom, the only reason to see this movie) turns up on his NYC doorstep. And so the gay narcissist learns to overcome his narcissism by putting his son’s nobler needs above Peter’s own selfishly depraved habits and addictions. Watch how his life opens!

The first thing that came to mind was a former friend who had her son via IVF. She said of the experience that up to that point in her life, it was as if she’d been behind a pane of glass, watching the world pass by, separated from her. And then her little boy came along, “and he walked me through the glass.” I’m sorry, but I really don’t like the idea of a human child being the cause of someone’s redemption or their spiritual awakening or whatever. The self-involved narcissism that the person (Peter Green in the instance of Club Kid) had to overcome is simply replaced with another even worse form of narcissism: your son becomes merely the vehicle for your newfound self-understanding, and that drives the entire concept of the movie. This is why narcissists should always just have pets, not kids.

Yes, some elements of queer community enter into the film, yet they seemed more like colorful sprinkles or ice-cream toppings to me: intradiegetically unrealistic, and lingering not just on the fringes of the narrative (as do those mini-performances, sweet though they may be), but pretty much entirely outside of it. I’d read in a couple of early reviews about the film’s final half-hour or so, so I didn’t need to stay for that part. No need for drama about Arlo’s immigration status, certainly no need for any courtroom scene nor its requisite heartfelt speech. I walked away caring only about the chemistry between Jordan Firstman and Reggie Absolom on screen, which is essentially the magic of casting, with some scattered bits of acting (mostly embodied in gazes and attitudes).

Any movie that tosses in a few quick references to Björk and Cocteau Twins has to be cool, right? Especially if an adorable little 10-year-old British kid is making them? Not necessarily. They have to come from somewhere that’s grounded in the scenes themselves and not tiny flashes of detail that are mostly just accessories. And the flimsiness of being just an accessory, cinematically, is what sank my hopes for this movie. I wanted to see it succeed, not just as a commercial product, but as an artful and worthwhile one. In the back row near my seat were some of the creative team, excited to see the gay audience at Newfest watch and embrace the film, a gay New York movie screened on a Friday night in Chelsea, the gay heart of New York City. I get it. Though I think there’s an insularity to all of that which kind of precludes the sense of objectivity required to make an authentically good movie. Please don’t let this one be nominated for any screenplay awards. Or acting awards. Whatever its successes might be, they’re more external than internal. Give it awards for casting or marketing. (Sorry not sorry, Jordan.)

The one arresting moment in the narrative for me was when Arlo tells Peter point-blank that his mother (who’d become the hazy memory butt-of-a-joke to Peter and his friends over the preceding decade) died by suicide. It’s invoked so fleetingly, however, that it’s almost as if the movie knows that it’s unable to look seriousness more directly in the eye because it’s trying to evoke a world where real tragedies don’t actually exist. They’re mentioned and hinted at, but they might as well be fantasy, just like the rest of the movie is. So I think that’s the tragic quality that taints the film for me, knowing that it could have aspired to be more than what it is, if only it had taken the time and hard-nosed attention required to figure that out in more intricate and rewarding ways.

Sunday, October 4, 2026

The Music of Duncan Sheik

I’m not comfortable writing about people who’ve died. Nor am I comfortable with books in my living space if they’re signed by people who’ve died, so I’ve often sold them or given them away to expurgate those ghosts. Yet being surrounded by music by people who’ve died doesn’t bother me at all. Music is so inherently tied to memory that the eventual loss of those who created it is just an inevitability. Songs project themselves into the future in a way that always foreshadows mortality, so in that sense, every song is an elegy. Of course, some songs are more intentionally elegiac than others, and the songs of Duncan Sheik, who died last month at age 56, while seemingly skyward-gazing, I think were locked in a fairly permanent downturned glance. The word “declension,” for some reason, comes to mind. A browsing down a list. Gentle shifting.

The key song in Duncan Sheik’s oeuvre, and the first on his two-disc pop career retrospective, Brighter/Later, is “That Says It All,” a tribute to his (male) musical heroes that tracks his praise for them while also admitting how he feels he might pale in comparison to them, lyrically. Jagger, Dylan, and Lennon get kudos in the first verse, then the second verse turns darker through the invocation of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, and Nick Drake, all of whom struggled with addiction and in two cases died quite young from drug overdoses, and in Nick Drake’s case, an overdose of an antidepressant, no less. I’d heard Duncan perform a solo concert of only Nick Drake covers, and we admired many of the same artists, so when I first met him back in January of 2007 at an album signing for his game-changing musical Spring Awakening, I told him that he had great taste in cover songs. He rolled his eyes at me and kind of sighed. “Yeah, that will probably be the next album project,” and it was. His covers of his favorite 1980s New Wave classics like The Blue Nile’s “Stay” and The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” are some of the most quietly powerful songs that he recorded, sung in his distinctively dressed-down tones, beyond somber. And so I think his roll of the eyes at me when I praised his taste in covers was not so much a dismissive insult but rather a quick visual admission that I got it. We are what we like.

But I also hadn’t stood in front of him praising his own compositions, just after he’d made the big decision to pivot from pop music to theatre, and theatre was largely where he stayed for the remainder of his career. I have all of his studio albums but little interest in them after his fourth album, 2002’s Daylight, which I think was probably his pop peak. His eponymous debut in 1996 had a couple of hits, which led to songs on rom-com soundtracks, and then 1998’s Humming showed him deepening his palate as he began to pursue Buddhism (quite seriously, not as a hobby). “Barely Breathing” and “She Runs Away” from his debut album were inward-looking for mainstream pop, but that debut also includes contemplative numbers like “November” and “The End of Outside,” conceived in a style that morphed in complex ways (again, for pop music, and even for occasionally orchestral pop music) by the time he arrived at Humming. On “In Between,” the opening track of that album, he sings, “I feel a little undefined” and “I’m in between, no use wondering what I mean,” in contrast to “the endless bright parade” of the apparent certainty of active life surrounding him. The song ends as an intimate apology for not being clearer-cut to the people closest to him.

Sheik’s third album, 2001’s Phantom Moon, featured lyrics by Steven Sater, a kind of preview to their work together on Spring Awakening and other musicals. I remember going over for dinner at the apartment of a guy I was dating, and I had the CD of Phantom Moon in my backpack, so we listened to it while we ate. “Who listens to music like this?” was his response. Needless to say, that was our last date, and the introspective, galaxy-spanning reach of Phantom Moon sort of defined where Duncan Sheik’s music would go from there. “Requiescat,” the album’s penultimate track, could have been written as a song to be played at Sheik’s own funeral, and Steven Sater quoted his own lyrics from the song at the beginning of a tribute piece that he wrote for Duncan after Duncan’s death. Death, as we know all too well, is nothing new, even if it always feels somehow so unfamiliar.

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Sara Bareilles, Good Grief (Epic Records, 2026)

It’s a demanding task to make something durable out of loss. That’s the central theme of Sara Bareilles’ immersive and instructive new album Good Grief, her first studio album (and accompanying tour) in seven years. Set into motion by the relatively early deaths of her close friends and career collaborators Gavin Creel and Chad Joseph, these fourteen exquisite songs chart Bareilles’ journey of mourning and healing; they also serve as a generous gift to her listeners worldwide who might be struggling with similar losses of their own and be grateful to find some redemption in what the Grammy-winning singer/songwriter has so carefully crafted and calibrated here. Last week, I watched Josh Alexander’s excellent documentary about the making of the album at a cinema in Boston, and in the film Bareilles mentions, lightheartedly but seriously, that she’s a total control freak. Having listened to the songs from Good Grief on a loop since watching the documentary, and also having heard her and her band perform the songs live at MGM Music Hall in Boston a couple of nights ago, it’s quite evident to me that the kind of control she’s referring to is what assisted her in creating the most mature album of her career so far, one with a totally clear-eyed vision which I’m certain will cut across all sorts of demographics and generations to help shape works of art that respond to human mortality, and furthermore, that guide us in navigating and transcending the levels of grief that our mortality ongoingly requires.

The album opens with “Home,” which Bareilles has explained was inspired by the Stephen Colbert episode of Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, where Colbert recounted losing his father and brothers back when he was only ten-years-old. The song’s refrain, “So tell me your story / I’ll tell you mine,” is the very intentional heart and mission of the album, demonstrating how the pain and difficulty of grief can become “good grief” by relying on the human capacities for narrative and memory. That transformative power can only really be accessed through sharing with others our stories and recollections of those who have passed from our lives. In the midst of inhabiting the tale of Colbert’s own losses and the wake of silence that followed in his childhood home, lines such as, “You be the universe / Nothing to hide” show how Bareilles’ aim is to widen her specific thematic focus to include and embrace all of us. That thread of far-ranging truthfulness continues on the album’s second track, “Just a Kid,” Bareilles’ homage to her college soulmate and first manager, Chad Joseph, who died young at the age of 40: “You never got to get married / And I hate where you’re buried / You never got old / You were just a kid… / This one’s for my best friend and he’s everywhere.”

Other forms of grief enter into the album’s midsection as well, with the powerful “Hands Off My Body” reacting to recent upheavals surrounding women’s physical autonomy and right to choose, and “Ladies in a Line” movingly addressing visits to the fertility clinic and attempts to have a child just a bit later in life because of career obligations throughout one’s younger adult years. The former song cleverly interrogates political right-wing Christian fundamentalism, while also sharply critiquing the cultural notion that women should just be as submissive as patriarchal authorities expect them to be: “So if I whisper it in silence / And deliver it swiftly / If I can make it sound godly / Would you get your hands off my body? / If I call for it gently / While I’m burning up / Would it be enough?” The latter song, by comparison and counterpoint, quietly and contemplatively speaks to the women hoping to be mothers and grappling with infertility: “Empty arms / With lists of names / The cruel truth of starting late / Life was asking / Other questions until now… / The depths of this are changing / Reminds me of the ocean floor / I’m just swimming where they tell me to / Till I can’t swim no more.” In the documentary’s studio scene before and after recording “Ladies in a Line,” Bareilles and her background vocalist Butterfly Boucher bond and cry together since they’re both struggling through the exact same issues at that time, which of course lends the song and its beautifully consoling harmonies an even greater resonance.

Two of the album’s finest songs showcase the work of the late non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who wrote unforgettably about their last few years before dying of metastatic ovarian cancer in July of 2025 at age 49, as documented in last year’s Oscar-nominated film Come See Me in the Good Light. Gibson’s voice is featured in a profound excerpt from their poetry on the song “A Love Story,” and the end-credits song from the documentary about Gibson, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” is Bareilles’ astounding duet with Brandi Carlile that also should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It’s followed by the album’s penultimate track, “Forever,” which finds Bareilles taking on the tender posthumous perspective of her recently departed friend, Tony Award winner Gavin Creel, with whom she co-starred on Broadway and spoke on the phone nearly every single day, right up until his death from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma at age 48: “And if you need me / And we’re not together / Close your eyes to see me better / I’ll be here forever… / If you are the bird I am the movement / If you are the words I am the music.”

Perhaps my favorite moment from Bareilles’ wonderful and memorable concert in Boston this past Thursday night, after she and her band had performed most of the songs from Good Grief and had expertly led the audience through that amount of thematic weight, came when she suddenly launched into a spirited and rousing rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and got the audience up on its feet to dance joyfully in unison. It was such a smart, unexpected move, and the perfect balance and antidote to everything that she’d played just before it. That particular and very precise song selection (out of the many upbeat, affirmative pop songs by other artists that I’m sure the band could have played instead) actively embodied what the closing excerpt of Andrea Gibson’s poem “The Nutritionist” from the song “A Love Story” exemplifies and rhythmically urges us all to do as the survivors:

“So let me say right now for the record,
I am still gonna be here
asking this world to dance,
even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet.

You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.

Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so, so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,
‘Live. Live. Live.’”