‘Magazine Dreams’ Review: Jonathan Majors Astounds

Let’s get this out of the way first: In December 2023, actor Jonathan Majors was found guilty on two of four charges in a domestic violence case involving ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari — assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree — and sentenced to 52 weeks in a domestic violence intervention program. After Marvel Studios made the controversial decision to fire him, Searchlight Pictures announced it would no longer release writer-director Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams, in which Majors earned raves at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Cut to 2025 and Majors has paid his debt to society, and the daredevils at Briarcliff Entertainment (who also released the Donald Trump supervillian origin story, The Apprentice) have picked up Magazine Dreams for U.S. distribution. Whatever your stance is on the actor, there is no denying that Majors’ stunning turn as a rage-filled bodybuilder in Magazine Dreams is so transfixing that it’s only a stone’s throw away from iconic performances by Robert De Niro and Joaquin Phoenix in the similarly-themed Taxi Driver and Joker, respectively.

A Sculptured Body, A Tortured Soul

Majors bares more than just his body to play Killian Maddox, a man with a single-minded obsession with becoming a championship bodybuilder. Scarfing down 6000 calories a day (as Majors actually did to prepare), injecting himself with steroids and enduring torturous training sessions, Killian has sculpted himself into a virtual Adonis.

When we meet him at his latest competition, he is bathed in cinematographer Adam Arkapaw’s chandelier glow. His body is chiseled to perfection and Majors has us mesmerized by his transformation. But it’s not Killian’s jacked, glistening body that signals to us that something may be wrong. It’s his smile. It’s forced, unnatural, trying too hard to impress. If Killian’s body represents who he wants to be, his strained smile represents what he is hiding.

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Majors’ performance enters your bloodstream as powerfully as the steroids that Killian injects to keep himself swole. His achievement is all the more impressive for how well he plays all sides of Killian’s splintered and troubled psyche. He’s someone who walks awkwardly through the world because his world has been governed by violence and the professional and personal judgment of strangers — many of whom are white.

While this has helped render him lonely and fragile, Killian can also be very sweet, caring for his Vietnam veteran grandfather William (Harrison Page), timidly asking out co-worker Jessie (Haley Bennett) and writing adoring letters to his idol, champion bodybuilder Brad Vanderhorn (Michael O’Hearn). In these moments, Majors makes us root for Killian despite the constant, nerve-shredding sense that tragedy is approaching, as years of disappointment and failing to achieve his dream of being on the cover of a bodybuilding magazine boil inside him.

Director Elijah Bynum Emerges as a Major Talent

For Bynum, Magazine Dreams is a career-making upgrade from his debut directing effort, 2017’s Timothée Chalamet drama, Hot Summer Nights. Here, Bynum directs with an intimacy and immediacy that ensures we never take our eyes off the screen. He’s crafted a detailed study of a powder keg of a character, a classic God’s Lonely Man who dotes over William one moment then, in the next, destroys with his bare hands the paint store whose owner wouldn’t add a second coat to William’s home. His behavioral issues, which he discusses with a court-appointed therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris), can’t just be addressed by muttering, “I control my emotions so my emotions don’t control me.”

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Killian’s problems are embedded deep within, and in building up his muscles to an insane degree, he’s building a wall to protect himself from his brittle sense of self-worth. In conveying Killian’s insecurity, Majors speaks with a soft voice that automatically assumes defeat, as when he stops himself in the middle of asking Jessie on a date. Later, when she agrees anyway, they go on a catastrophic dinner date where the protective armor of his muscles, which must be maintained at all costs, keeps him from making a deep personal connection.

To Killian, Being Ignored Is Like Being Dead

Killian, more than anything, wants to be remembered, and being ignored is one of his triggers. When he Googles “how to make people remember me,” his thoughts, and ours, drift towards an obvious answer: violence. With Jason Hill’s somber score assuming this very real possibility, Bynum ratchets up our discomfort and forces us to reflect upon Black athletes being evaluated by white judges and Black citizens taken down by white police officers.

In one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, an armed Killian confronts a pudgy, white competition judge who long ago criticized his deltoids, making him strip and pose while Killian revels in being the judge instead of the judged. To watch this terrifying exchange is to witness a striking riff on the themes found in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, where power dynamics, and the society that created them, favor the white person over the Black person.

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In less capable hands, Killian pointing a finger gun at innocent bystanders and, later, grabbing a real gun and threatening to live up to the first syllable of his name would be treading too far into Taxi Driver territory. And by the final, painfully tense stretch, there seems to be no degradation that Killian cannot suffer from. Bynum risks larding on the indignities to the point of abstraction, including Killian’s failed visit to a prostitute (a memorable Taylour Paige) and his debasement at the hands of his bodybuilding hero.

But it all comes together, building to an operatic, if long-winded, climax that could have been distancing yet is not. In fact, it’s the opposite. Thanks to Bynum’s control and Majors’ profoundly impressive performance, no matter what element of Killian’s pathology he is acting upon — insecurity, loneliness, resentment — we can find at least a piece of it in all of us. Magazine Dreams, a production of Zeus Films, Los Angeles Media Fund, JF Productions and Tall Street Productions, and distributed by Briarcliff Entertainment, will be released in theaters on March 21.