Keep the Lights On

Charting an NYC gay couple’s highs and lows over a nine-year span, Sachs’s drama about an epically enabling relationship touches on drug addiction, codependency, the perils of phone-sex party lines and the pain of endless breakup/make-up cycles. This indie love story’s strength, however, lies in Sachs’s refusal to romanticize his fucked-up duo, while never giving their lengthy, can’t-live-without-you romance short shrift. It’s lovingly raw, uncompromising and the director’s strongest work since 1996’s The Delta.