Don Shanahan
The unnerving independent film Magazine Dreams opens on a bodybuilder going through rehearsed poses that activate certain muscle groups or body areas. The overhead stage lights, arranged and captured by superb Macbeth cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, project a dreamlike incandescent glow. His camera frames the body in portions, never the full visage. Even in these measured glimpses, it’s hard not to instinctively marvel at the human form.
The way Arkapaw’s lighting emphasizes the advanced shapeliness calls to mind the classic idiom of “cast in a good light.” The bulk of the muscular definition creates shadows below the lit, rounded peaks, providing darkened contrasts. The accompanying coatings of oil and tanning products provide even more color and shine, caught by the light and the lenses. Extra flash bulbs and a rehearsed wide smile of pearly-white teeth add the finishing pops.
Bodybuilders like Killian Maddox, the lead character of Magazine Dreams, played by Emmy nominee Jonathan Majors of Creed III fame and Marvel Cinematic Universe infamy, desperately want to be “cast in a good light” such as this. What is being lit and flexed is created by countless hours to maximize, as Maddox defines, the “four S’s” of size, striation, symmetry, and strength. All of those outside artificial elements try to accentuate the tangible physical perfection. However, these shimmering varnishes can also be seen as a form of mask.
As Hot Summer Nights writer/director Elijah Bynum follows Killian beyond and between these formal bodybuilding competitions, the converse of that first idiom is revealed to a damaging and violent degree. Away from the electric golden hue of the prime stage, Arkapaw and Bynum loved tinting the lesser settings of this movie in stark colors and different speeds of flickering shifts. By thematically casting its subjects “in a bad light,” fluidity is broken and flaws are exposed. The light of these less-than-radiant hues and quite intentional choices singe our main character and often morph muscle into menace.
With suffocating stress and simmering suspense, Magazine Dreams presents a character study where any luminosity of good light in its man is methodically and maniacally being extinguished by emotional turmoil. Maddox is a solitary man hellbent on becoming a champion bodybuilder, idolizing the current top guy, Brad Vanderhorn (retired award-winning bodybuilder Michael O’Hearn). When he’s not clanging and banging iron at the gym, Killian is trying to earn extra money to provide care for the grandfather (veteran TV character actor Harrison Page) he lives with by working as a stockperson at a local grocery store, where he’s smitten with a cashier named Jessie (Haley Bennett of Widow Clicquot and The Girl on the Train).
Needless to say, social graces are not Killian’s forte, as he’s nearly a failure at everything that’s not bodybuilding—wallowing in catastrophic loneliness and disparaging awkwardness. He tries for a date with Jessie and hopelessly writes letters to Brad. Our view of his day-to-day life in Magazine Dreams reveals a checkered history. After a previously documented and convicted violent fit, Maddox attends state-mandated therapy sessions with Patricia Waldon (two-time Paul Thomas Anderson good luck charm Harriet Sansom Harris of Licorice Pizza and Phantom Thread), where she worries about the combination of his aggression with unchecked migraines and nightmares. The twitchy Killian puts a wall up and denies all of it, exuding a false front of goal-driven self-improvement from bodybuilding.
With this foundation rooted in prior violent behavior and clearly decayed core values, Magazine Dreams extends the often-used trope that rage and this choice of showy athletic discipline go hand in hand. The combination of addictions, from protein and porn to PEDs, constantly warp and burden Majors’ central figure. Bynum isn’t exposing or pondering the stereotype in his film. He’s seeing how far he can engorge it—literally and figuratively–and, even scarier, weaponize it. In its increasingly fateful episodes of broken psyche, set to Jason Hill’s jarring musical score, Magazine Dreams dares taking those rage-laced threats to Bickle-ian proportions before it’s all said and done.
For decades now outside of Magazine Dreams, the term “beast” has been thrown around a great deal in the fitness and sports worlds as an affirmative badge of distinction. This is an alarming movie, where the label fits both the positive and negative connotations. Candidly, there may not be a less blunt way to put this: It takes a beast to play a beast. Drastically transforming his body, Jonathan Majors looks and acts the part of an absolute beast. With beasts comes carnal superiority but also collateral wreckage, as this film is a colossal tale of self-destruction (and one that unfortunately is smeared by Majors’ own off-screen troubles). Majors is an accomplished enough dramatic actor to shoulder and convey those increasing fractures and manic obsessions behind mental obstacles with authenticity equal to the shredded physique he worked to acquire.
Magazine Dreams is frequently harrowing and hard to watch for the main character and, quite frankly, for Jonathan Majors himself. Delayed and maligned as it may be, this 2023 Sundance Film Festival award winner stands as a career-best for Majors. Had circumstances and public favor been different, he would have given last year’s Best Actor Oscar field a run for its money. This writer has no qualms allowing new consideration for him moving forward to the 98th Academy Awards. Separating the person from the performance is, and should be, essential.
As frightful and grisly as Majors and Magazine Dreams get, there is an unmistakable lure to their intensity and damaged textures. Majors’ narration, reactions, and jaded silent acts infuse a more layered human lost underneath the monstrous muscles and vices. He is undeniably impressive in those feats. True to form—beast and all—the actor and the film have deservedly earned fair and imposing recognition for never shying away from the good and bad light cast against them on screen and off.
