The grueling character study “Magazine Dreams” has had a rocky road to the screen, fighting uphill against everything that fate, its star and arguably its director could throw against it.
Yet there’s no denying the movie’s central performance — a work of body and character sculpture in extremis, carved from muscle and willpower. That performance is the jewel in a zirconium crown.
- Starring: Jonathan Majors, Harrison Page, Haley Bennett, Michael O’Hearn, Taylour Paige.
- Rating: R for violent content, drug use, sexual material/nudity and language.
“Magazine Dreams” debuted at Sundance 2023, where a mixed-to-positive reception was overshadowed two months later by lead actor Jonathan Majors’ arrest and subsequent conviction for reckless assault against his then-girlfriend.
Searchlight Pictures backed out of distributing the film, which was later picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment, a company that likes to take chances on redheaded stepchildren like this movie and the Donald Trump drama “The Apprentice.”
Majors was sentenced in April 2024 to 52 weeks in a domestic violence intervention program.
Two years after its Sundance debut, “Magazine Dreams” finally comes to theaters in the same week that new audio has surfaced, wherein Majors appears to admit to strangling his ex-girlfriend.
Majors’ role, Killian Maddox, suggests Travis Bickle of “Taxi Driver” as a young Black bodybuilder: obsessive, friendless, wavering between insecurity and rage. When “Magazine Dreams” opens, Killian is caring for his ailing grandfather (Harrison Page) in a California suburb and posting muscleman videos on YouTube that are roundly mocked for their cringe-inducing strangeness. We see him competing at a local he-man event among rivals whose bodies are so developed that they seem insectoid, all thorax and carapace. When Killian smiles, it looks like a cry for help.
In writer-director Elijah Bynum’s (“Hot Summer Nights”) dark worldview, help is not forthcoming.
“Magazine Dreams” touches on issues of performative masculinity, steroid abuse, body shame, racial stereotypes, “incel” anger and more, but at its core is a desperately lonely man, a damaged child inside the body of a monster truck. Killian’s interactions with other people toggle between stammering uncertainty and ’roid-fueled fury when he senses he’s not getting his due. And it’s the achievement of the movie that we see how inseparable the two sides are, and how encouraged they are by a culture that barely notices someone like Killian, let alone cares about him.
Attempts to reach out to a co-worker he’s attracted to (Haley Bennett) and the title-winning bodybuilder he idolizes (Michael O’Hearn) end in disappointment. Bennett is especially touching as a woman whose expressions during an awkward restaurant date change from hope to concern to a bone-deep sadness.
But it’s Majors who keeps a viewer riveted even as “Magazine Dreams” relentlessly and reductively pushes Killian on a downward slope toward madness. A diner sequence in which he terrorizes the family of a man who beat him up earlier in the film is a queasy high point, the hero’s self-loathing wrestling with his tortured self-worth and pushing him to become the Scary Black Man he knows - wants, fears - the world to see him as.
Majors (“The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” HBO’s “Lovecraft Country”) delivers a gripping, fully felt piece of acting that approaches Brando/De Niro/Bale levels of body modification. But he never loses sight of the lost boy inside the hulk.
Unfortunately, the rest of “Magazine Dreams” isn’t sure what to do with the performance. Bynum starts the film in high gear and revs the engine from there, straining the narrative momentum and a viewer’s patience. And he moves Killian toward a climactic act of violence that the movie absurdly tries to have both ways.
This is a movie with “Taxi Driver” and Martin Scorsese on the brain, but one that lacks the pitiless concision of its model. I’ve seen it twice now, at Sundance in 2023 and recently, and both times I spent the first hour watching in a trance of uncomfortable awe — the filmmaking and the acting are that strong.
But as Killian unravels in scene after unmodulated scene, “Magazine Dreams” starts spinning its wheels. At just over two hours, it’s much too long, with multiple false endings that leave the audience ground to an exhausted nub.
The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.
First Published: March 21, 2025, 2:10 p.m.
