Magazine Dreams review – powerful bodybuilding drama dogged by star Jonathan Majors’ assault conviction | Film
BIn 2023, rising star Jonathan Majors was swinging for the fences and beyond in this colossal, Paul Schrader-esque psychodrama about an aspiring bodybuilder, for which Majors put himself into beastly proportions. Many expected it to play a significant role in the awards conversation, with key scenes surely destined to be shown in sizzling clips at endless awards shows and invoked in countless opinion pieces about fragile masculinity. But no. Now it’s almost a modern film cursedalmost forgotten, a cursed film which is only now being released quietly, and perhaps its star is cursed Also.
Majors plays Killian Maddox, an iron-pumping wannabe who cares for his disabled grandfather and cultivates a fan obsession with the stars of the bodybuilding circuit. He is particularly fond of a handsome cake named Brad Vanderhorn, whose magazine covers Killian’s casts on the walls of his dreary bedroom, and dreams of appearing on those covers himself. Killian suffers from loneliness, depression, incipient mental illness, body dysmorphia, and an inability to connect with women. At one point, he has a disastrous Travis Bickle-style date with Jessie (Haley Bennett), a co-worker at the supermarket where he works during the day. And he’s addicted to steroids, which trigger a terrifying “oid rage.”
But the film and Major’s career were destroyed by his 2023 conviction on two counts of assault and harassment against his then-girlfriend. The situation seemed eerily similar to the film’s storyline, but without the fictional reassurance that the man involved was fundamentally gentle. Magazine Dreams itself, while flawed by a cumbersome flashback structure in which he talks to a counselor, has some strong moments and Majors is very good, particularly in the bizarre scene where Killian insists on going on stage at a bodybuilding event right after being beaten up. The plot builds into an interesting revelation about #MeToo-style abuse, although the impact of this was also clouded by Major’s own life. Undressed, Majors presents an astonishing vesalian anatomy of pain.
