Magazine Dreams Is a Punishing Experience

We spend Magazine Dreams waiting for the main character to hurt someone. The movie floats that threat, or promise, early on, in a scene where Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) meets with a counselor played by Harriet Sansom Harris. Killian didn’t choose to be there, and if that weren’t clear from his visible discomfort and terse responses, the unnamed woman spells it out by mentioning their sessions are state-mandated and nonnegotiable if he wants to continue caring for his ailing grandfather (Harrison Page). She brings up his migraines and hallucinations in which he hears his late mother’s voice, and his history of aggression, which includes a recent incident at the hospital that resulted in Killian telling the nurses he was going to “split their skulls apart and drink their brains like soup.” He responds by launching into a non sequitur about living in a food desert and having to drive six miles for fresh produce. “No grocery stores — just junk food, food that kills you,” he murmurs. “I think they do that on purpose.” Killian is painstaking about his diet, though his care about what goes into his body doesn’t extend to the steroids that are causing his liver to sprout tumors, or the coke that also isn’t combining well with the anger issues. But as Elijah Bynum’s movie attests, being an isolated loner fits into the bodybuilding lifestyle as neatly as nesting dolls.

Magazine Dreams is Taxi Driver for looksmaxxing, and it’s so intentionally painful that watching it in a single sitting feels as punishing as the lifestyle Killian subjects himself to. Some will opt out entirely, given that its star, Majors, was accused of domestic violence and ultimately found guilty of one count of reckless assault against his former partner Grace Jabbari, with reports offering other allegations of abusive behavior. The choice to seek out or avoid someone’s work based on their history is a personal one, in no small part because the film and television industries appear to have opted out of establishing any firm boundaries, and Majors is one of a slate of actors who are shouldering their way back into the mainstream after temporarily being deemed too radioactive. But Magazine Dreams — which was dumped by original buyer Searchlight, then picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor that’s made a name for itself betting on what it calls “distressed assets” — isn’t a movie that lends itself to a separation of art from artist. It’s about a man with an obsessive dedication to his calling and an explosive temper, and if you’ve followed Majors’s attempted redemption tour, your mind will absolutely wander to the recently leaked audio in which he admits to strangling and pushing Jabbari.

But it’s also hard not to think about the degree to which we overvalue the kind of transformative, all-in performance Majors gives here. When Magazine Dreams premiered at Sundance in 2023, it sparked a bidding war that absolutely hinged on the possibility of an Oscar run for its not-yet-fallen star, who every day both ate over 6,000 calories and worked out three times in preparation for the role. Awards campaigns are built on this stuff, on stories of Method immersion and physical sacrifice, both of which are evident in the bulging muscles Majors puts on display whenever Killian poses, and in the grimaces Killian can’t help but make whenever he’s trying to act normal. Majors put a lot of work into the part, and it’s all visible onscreen, but to what end? Magazine Dreams certainly isn’t inept, and Bynum, who wrote as well as directed it, summons a devastatingly spare atmosphere that’s broken up with some arrestingly dreamlike compositions when Killian arrives at a show or competition. But it consists of the same idea, underlined over and over. When the film begins, Killian is already so isolated and off-kilter, a genuine oddball for reasons that may be related to his mental health, background, or personality, that there’s hardly anywhere for him to spiral out to.

Killian spends his extra time writing desperate fan letters to his idol, Brad Vanderhorn (Michael O’Hearn), and watching porn with a clinical eye while drinking protein shakes. Whether Killian’s fixation on the perfect male body is born out of covetousness or unacknowledged desire is brushed on, but left ambiguous, though he has two unsuccessful encounters with women, played by Haley Bennett and Taylour Paige, that only further usher him toward disaster. Killian’s life amounts to a series of brutal routines broken up by occasional bouts of rage or despair, but neither Bynum nor Majors attempt to let you inside the character — he’s a beetle getting pinned alive to a handsomely crafted display case. Magazine Dreams is a something’s-wrong-with-men movie that doesn’t actually want to delve deeply into the pain its protagonist is experiencing, because it finds the external manifestations of his alienation more compelling. It’s nothing more than a stunt, one that ends by shrugging and surmising that the best we can do is hope that people realize they’re better than committing mass shootings. Nothing about the movie or its rollout suggests that people can be counted on for anything.