‘Magazine Dreams' Review: Pain Without Gain

New York Times

20-03-2025

Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) has one goal in life: to be the greatest bodybuilder on Earth. His focus is so single-minded that he has little else to talk about. About a third of the way into 'Magazine Dreams,' the shy Killian, having finally worked up the courage to ask, takes Jessie (Haley Bennett), his colleague at a supermarket, on a date.
It doesn't go well. At the restaurant, Killian startles Jessie with his casual disclosure of his mother's violent death. ('Someone killed her. My dad did. He shot her and then he shot himself. That's why they're both dead.') He orders enough protein to feed a platoon. Then he regales her with details of his regimen and his fear that others don't respect him. 'I'm going to place and get my pro card,' he tells Jessie. 'Then I bet they won't just walk by me.'
The too-briefly-seen Bennett has the Cybill Shepherd role in this strained effort to make 'Taxi Driver' for bodybuilders. On the evidence, the writer-director, Elijah Bynum, has also studied Scorsese's other work, particularly 'The King of Comedy' (Killian writes obsessive letters to an idol who has made the cover of Men's Health) and the Steadicam march to the boxing ring in 'Raging Bull.'
Bynum supplies his own version of that shot midway through, when Killian, having just been savagely beaten by a group of men whose store he has wrecked, arrives at a bodybuilding competition still bloody. In a single, fluid camera movement, Killian enters the building and takes the stage, flexing his muscles and visibly struggling to grin through his pain. It's an impressive show of bravado from both the actor and the director, albeit in a way that makes it difficult to tell who's swaggering more — the character or the filmmaker.
'Magazine Dreams' bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity. Bynum piles on the misery in increasingly bogus ways. As big as Killian is, he has thin skin from the time a judge told him his deltoids were too small. He's too naïve to realize that posting a video of his training online will invite nasty comments. After he crashes his car, a doctor informs him that he needs surgery. 'I can't have a scar,' Killian replies. 'I'm a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders can't have scars.' Perhaps at a loss as to how to resolve the drama in a less hackneyed manner, Bynum adds guns.
This macho posturing was apparent when 'Magazine Dreams' played in January 2023 at the Sundance Film Festival, where Oscar prognosticators name-checked Majors as an awards contender. Actorly transformations into laconic, bulked-up, emotionally concussed giants are tough to resist. But the movie became damaged goods two months later when Majors was arrested and charged with assaulting and harassing his girlfriend at the time, Grace Jabbari. Majors, who denied the accusations, was found guilty on two of four counts that December and sentenced to probation and a year of domestic violence counseling.
Now 'Magazine Dreams' arrives in theaters much later than originally planned, with a new distributor and some unfortunate real-life echoes. The first significant dialogue is spoken by a counselor (Harriet Sansom Harris), who tells Killian, 'The state has mandated these sessions because they're worried about your aggression.' (In a movie pumped with testosterone, Harris and Bennett are vital presences; Taylour Paige has the only other significant female role, as a prostitute.) Prone to outbursts, Killian has a go-to threat: 'I'm going to split your skull open and drink your brains like soup.'
The line is meant to sound overwrought, but only a screenwriter could be amused.