Magazine Dreams Review

Magazine Dreams is an eye-catching drama that comes within inches of genuine insight. As a tale of male body image, it’s uniquely poised to dig into a subject few other American films have touched. But as a look at how pain and humiliation can build like a pressure cooker, it unfortunately fizzles out. At times, it captures self-destruction in the vein of Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash or Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or Black Swan – all films about people’s minds and bodies being shattered by their obsessions. But ultimately, it comes down safely on the side of prescriptive storytelling rather than going full-tilt with its most visceral and disturbing possibilities.

Written and directed by Elijah Bynum, Magazine Dreams follows socially awkward LA bodybuilder Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors), who Bynum and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw introduce as a physical specimen first and a character second. We meet him on a stage surrounded by fellow muscle men, backed by classical music and bathed in golden light. As he poses, a dreamy haze frames his impressive physique in silhouette; the camera worships Maddox’s chiseled form as though he were a Greek god cast in marble.

This is how Maddox wants to be seen. Internally, however, he’s in constant anguish, demonstrated by the way he can barely ask out Jessie (Haley Bennett), the shy woman who works at a supermarket with him, without stammering and crumbling in on himself. When he finally does, their first date quickly goes from hilariously awkward to intensely unpleasant, then verging on eerie. The more Jessie tries to connect with Maddox the more his anxieties turn his focus inward, shifting the conversation to his dreams of gracing magazine covers (hence the title), just like the jacked idols whose pictures grace his bedroom wall.

Majors’ performance turns each intrusive thought into shackles of deep self-loathing that Maddox can’t quite shake off. These bubble to the surface as troubled, obsessive outbursts, which the actor wields with a terrifying unpredictability. (This makes it a little more difficult for those who follow the news not to view Magazine Dreams through the lens of Majors’ conviction on charges of assault and harassment.)

There is, however, brief respite to be found. The only person Maddox seems comfortable around is his ailing grandfather, William (Harrison Page), a calming presence and Maddox’s North Star when it comes to figuring out how to be man. Then again, the experience that most defined William was the Vietnam War, so despite Page’s sweet and encouraging demeanor, the wisdom that his character imparts winds up instilling a military strictness in his grandson’s approach to eating, working out, and other, more clandestine aspects of the bodybuilding lifestyle (i.e. steroid injections). He even refers to mundane tasks as “jumping in the trenches and facing the enemy.”

It’s no surprise, then, that when the world’s apathy and unkindness come down hard on his shoulders, Maddox immediately responds with aggression. His internal violence is just as discomforting as his outbursts, given how Bynum captures the details of his routine: the pained smile he puts on when he strains himself on stage, or the joyless way he treats food as mere fuel for muscle growth. Meanwhile, the way a thick, milky protein shake dribbles down his chin, coupled with those hunky posters on his wall, suggests that Maddox’s obsession with the male form might go deeper than his professional ambitions. But despite presenting numerous homoerotic images in close proximity, Magazine Dreams pulls its punches with anything related to Maddox’s attraction to men, including the head-scratching decision to depict key moments of complex intimacy with a man whose physique he admires entirely off-screen.

It’s as if Magazine Dreams is afraid of committing to all its challenging, confrontational ideas about cycles of masculine violence, and would rather hint at them instead. After Maddox is pushed to (and even past) his physical and emotional limits, the question of how explosively he might respond looms large in the foreground, but are never answered. The result is a film that doesn’t bother getting its hands dirty.