Magazine Dreams stars Jonathan Majors.Briarcliff Entertainment
- Magazine Dreams
- Written and directed by Elijah Bynum
- Starring Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett and Taylour Paige
- Classification N/A; 124 minutes
- Opens in select theatres March 21
Magazine Dreams makes a few big requests of its audience. Not only does the ruthlessly dark character study about a psychologically damaged bodybuilder demand its viewers possess a strong stomach and an unflinching eye, but you also might need to practise some skillful cognitive dissonance when it comes to separating the film from the headlines surrounding it – specifically, about its star, Jonathan Majors.
When Magazine Dreams debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2023, Majors wasn’t so much on the cusp of stardom as he was solidly living the Hollywood dream. After breaking out in a number of indie films, including a marvellously sensitive turn in 2019′s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Majors was balancing prestige projects with such directors as Spike Lee alongside pivotal roles inside major-studio franchises (Creed III, the Marvel Cinematic Universe). But Magazine Dreams – which stars Majors as a violent outsider in Travis Bickle mode – was positioned as the actor’s entryway into the Oscars race, with Disney subsidiary Searchlight Pictures snapping the film up after its warmly received Sundance premiere.
A little more than two years later, and the conversation has flipped, with Majors having lost his Marvel gig after his conviction in December, 2023, for misdemeanour assault and harassment during an altercation with his ex-girlfriend. (The actor was ordered by the court to complete counselling but avoided jail time.) For a good while, it seemed like Majors, and Magazine Dreams, was done.
But Hollywood is an exceptionally forgiving place. For the past few weeks, Majors has been back in the public eye as he and Magazine Dreams’ new distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, have staged a full-court comeback campaign, complete with emotional interviews with sympathetic journalists and, as revealed just a few days ago, a surprise wedding between the star and actress Meagan Good.
So, that’s the ugly background. But watching Magazine Dreams does not only require its audience to simply participate in the age-old art vs. the artist debate. Because the film itself is entirely focused on toxic masculinity, and because Majors fills nearly every single one of its frames, watching the movie necessitates engaging in an entirely new kind of dialogue, one that considers what is happening both on screen and off, and how each world might have informed the other. While recognizing that this is completely unfair to writer-director Elijah Bynum, there are simply few ways to watch his feature without grimly dissecting every one of Majors’s decisions as an actor.
The film’s irrevocably blurred lines do, though, have the backward benefit of frequently taking you out of Magazine Dreams’ pit of despair before you fall too deep into its one-note darkness. A seemingly serious student of Loner Cinema – the kind of murky character studies a la Taxi Driver, One Hour Photo and Joker – Bynum offers a sometimes fascinating window into the disturbing subculture of professional bodybuilding, but throws the shades so wide open that all his intentions are revealed from the get-go. Like Majors’s chiselled physique, which is almost a special effect all its own, Magazine Dreams takes unironic pride in flexing its themes so nakedly and frequently that there’s little left to the imagination.
But while the story itself – a relentless dirge that follows a friendless gym nut named Killian whose fantasy of landing a Men’s Health cover fuels his violent tendencies – bottoms out long before the film’s finale arrives, there is no question that Majors delivers a magnificently unsettling performance.
As Killian stumbles through a series of disturbing incidents – a supremely uncomfortable first date with a co-worker (Haley Bennett) from his grocery store, a confrontation with the men hired to paint his grandfather’s house, a meeting with his professional idol – Majors’s intense and controlled work keeps the film’s leaden storytelling from collapsing in on itself.
Just how the actor pushed himself to such a rotted place, and how much of his own persona bled into Killian, is an impossible question to deliberate. The ultimate results are all there on screen, for any audience to judge inside or outside the real-world context. Before Majors’s court case, Magazine Dreams would have been a remarkably hard sell for even the thickest-skinned of audiences. Today, it is an even more challenging proposition. The rewards are there, but they come with a cost.
