Magazine Dreams Review: Jonathan Majors Flexes His Might in Schrader-Like Trajedy

Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.

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Magazine Dreams
Photo: Sundance Institute

At once a haunting portrait of a distinctly American psyche and an often nail-biting thriller, writer-director Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams traces a narrative arc markedly similar to any number of Paul Schrader’s stories about the imprisonment of men’s souls. The film also seemingly takes place in the same hyper-sensory realm inhabited by the social rejects of Josh and Benny Safdie’s work, with every grimly sumptuous image attuned to the extremity of its bodybuilder protagonist’s addled state of mind. Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection, which turns out to consist in the internalization of manifold forms of abuse.

The similarity between Bynum’s headfirst dive into resentment born of stymied male subjectivity and Schrader’s work is so unmistakable that, at its strongest moments, Magazine Dreams suggests the film that Todd Philipps was trying to make with Joker. In this case, we have an ever-sulking loner, Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors), struggling with trauma, misfortune, and psychosis within an indifferent society and burying these insecurities in his obsessive personal ambition centered around an idol. The exhibitionist profession that this Black man aspires to is bodybuilding, and the idol he longs to emulate and impress is Mr. Olympia 1993, Brad Vanderhorn (played by real-life bodybuilder Mike O’Hearn).

Living alone with his ailing grandfather, William (Harrison Page), Maddox seeks solace in his imaginary relationship with Vanderhorn. He spends his evenings writing the man fan letters while absent-mindedly downing protein drinks, enormous chunks of broccoli, and the other components of his 6,000-calorie-a-day diet. Maddox has invested his entire being into the goal of becoming a magazine-cover staple of Vanderhorn’s stature, and Majors elicits immediate pathos as someone with a fixation on a singular, seemingly hopeless path toward self-validation. Maddox’s crescendoing grunts as he strikes poses or does pull ups with a sizable weight strapped to his waist speak to more than just his striving toward Vanderhornic greatness, but also to the layers of pain and frustration that he buries at most other times.

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A crucial distinction between the film and other attempts to re-bottle the Schrader magic is that race plays a significant role here. Maddox plasters his wall with photos of Vanderhorn and other mostly white and spray-tanned weightlifters, striving toward that image of fully realized maleness and all the power and privilege that it connotes. And while Magazine Dreams hardly defines Maddox by his race alone, a competition early on in the film in which the sinewy contestants flexing on stage are Black while the judges are white carries at least a whiff of the auction blocks where enslaved people were judged as physical specimens.

In this scene and numerous others, Majors displays his jaw-droppingly toned body, to erotically charged and often strangely haunting effect. The film opens with a warmly lit, lusciously shadowed image of the actor alone on a stage, his abdominals bulging over his skimpy Speedo. These scenes play up the wide gulf between Maddox’s highly composed body and his damaged, even dissociative psyche. He’s different people in different scenarios: With his grandfather and his social worker, Patricia (Harriet Sansom Harris), his speech is clear and fluid, and when recording an instructional YouTube video or talking to Jessie (Haley Bennett), the woman he’s crushing on at the supermarket where they both work, he’s practically inarticulate.

Maddox also struggles to control his temper, a facet of his personality that may have to do with the steroids that he regularly injects, the trauma that he went through when he was younger and opens up about with chilling bluntness midway through the film, or both. Killian’s rage instigates the series of events that send him spiraling toward an existential-psychological implosion, after he trashes a local hardware store for ignoring his grandfather’s requests to fix a shoddy paint job. The aftermath launches Maddox through a gauntlet of physical pain and dispiriting failures, from car crashes to racist assaults to romantic and sexual humiliation.

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Many of Maddox’s tribulations might serve on their own as a climactic summary of the toll that unrealistic body standards, personal trauma, insufficient coping methods, and social prejudice take on the body and mind. But, perhaps precisely because his problems are so overdetermined, Bynum piles their various outcomes on top of each other, holding the film’s last hour in a state of perpetual, torturous climax. There’s rarely a let-up of tension as we cringe through Maddox’s increasingly self-destructive attempts at holding his fragile sense of self together.

At a certain point, the humanity that a committed Majors so effectively communicates begins to take something of a backseat to the sensorial intensity of it all. With a soundtrack that skillfully bounces between thrash metal and ominous synth growls, and a camera likewise flexible but deliberate in its movement through space, each scene impresses with its intensity and expression of the progressively degrading state of things. At times, though, Maddox can seem like a grab-bag of psychological complexes and verbal tics assembled to serve the story’s themes.

For one, the childishness that Maddox displays in an encounter with a sex worker (Taylour Paige) rings too familiar a pop-psychology bell. Not only does the scene—bathed in red hues that recall many a Scorsese film—contribute to the redundant feeling that creeps in during the final act, but the jaded sex worker raising an eyebrow at the strangely naïve repressed male is a rather stock representation of arrested male development. It’s rarely difficult to mistake what Bynum is going for, even when he’s tweaking Taxi Driver’s narrative blueprint—and this includes a finale that attempts to subvert expectations but feels more like it’s evading consequences.

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However, the connection that Bynum draws between Maddox’s pathologically insecure body image issues—he frequently asks others whether they find his deltoids too small, as a judge in Cleveland once told him—and standards determined by magazines and the white gaze also adds more than a wrinkle to this overly familiar story. Magazine Dreams might be read as making a compelling case that America’s racial divide has been the suppressed content of every similar such story. After all, on which group of men does both the blame and the brunt of society’s inequities usually fall? In Bynum’s flawed but often riveting film, outward physical perfection becomes both the mask and the sign of many kinds of dreams deferred.

Score: 
 Cast: Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige, Mike O’Hearn, Harrison Page, Harriet Sansom Harris  Director: Elijah Bynum  Screenwriter: Elijah Bynum  Running Time: 124 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2023

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

1 Comment

  1. Bynum’s first film was a direct and obvious PTA rip-off and an abject failure. Looks like he’s moved on to ripping off the Safdies. Good for him. Maybe for his next film he can rip off Ari Aster or Robert Eggers. Some people don’t have a single original thought or idea in their head and yet they still want to be rewarded for their derivations. Bynum appears to be one of those people.

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