Magazine Dreams (2023 | USA | 124 minutes | Elijah Bynum)
First take: In MAGAZINE DREAMS, Jonathan Majors contorts his arresting muscles into a hypertrophic symphony of pain, but to what end? I bailed out at the 90 minute mark, regretting I waited that long.
At various points in Magazine Dreams, amateur bodybuilder Killian Maddox threatens to crack someone’s skull open and “drink their brains like soup”. As portrayed by Jonathan Majors, you don’t doubt the veracity of the threat. From the very beginning, Elijah Bynum’s camera lingers in golden disbelief at the state of the actor’s physique, all rippling muscles, flexing and contorting, shaped through relentless training. The physical transformation alone is unsettling and that’s before we even get into a plotline and performance that drew ubiquitous comparisons to Taxi Driver.
Here he plays an emotionally and intellectually stunted adult, already in state-mandated therapy for a previous violent incident. Nevertheless, he remains the primary caretaker for his Vietnam War veteran grandfather. His bedroom wallpapered with fitness magazine covers, he’s filled his body with thousands of daily calories of lean protein, an unhealthy amount of steroids, and spent nearly all his free time in service of attaining a highly skewed ideal. A judge’s comments about the small size of his deltoids haunts him, he can’t get his legs to bulk, and the childlike letters he writes to his bodybuilding idol remain steadfastly unanswered. He’s prone to bouts of destructive outrage and the google searches for “how to get people to like you” that motivate his terrifying, misplaced, rictus grins aren’t working either.
As a showcase for Majors’s acting, it’s undoubtedly titanic. But those who’ve been paying attention since The Last Black Man in San Francisco already knew that. With help from closely observed cinematography, a jarring soundtrack that swings wildly from hard metal and opera, and — one can only hope — the help of the best trainers known to Marvel or Creed, Majors creates a deeply troubled and widely misunderstood man. Be it the disappointment of a relatable aghast date, the weary unease of strangers, or violent retribution, inhabiting Maddox’s space is an incredibly trying experience.
To a degree inducing such extreme second-hand suffering is the mark of success, but to what end? We get occasional flashes, glimpses through his self-styled facade, but Maddox is so unknown to even himself that following along as Majors flexes his muscles into a hypertrophic symphony of self-destructive pain becomes an exercise in agony. While I marveled at the prowess of his commitment and the perfection applied to sculpting his physical transformation, I didn’t have the fortitude to see it to the end.
Magazine Dreams premiered in-person and will be an available online at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition.