Bodybuilding is all about excess—the athlete pushes the limits of building muscle, flexing in unnatural poses to pop and highlight different parts of the body, all while holding a forced smile as their almost-naked physique glistens with oil and tanning lotion. It’s a very specific and strange (to me) sport… fascinating and shockingly over-the-top.
In Magazine Dreams, Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) works out obsessively, injects steroids into his glutes, and gazes at the aspirational posters and magazine pics of his favorite bodybuilders that he has stuck all over his wall and ceiling. He’s the self-professed number-one fan of Mr. Olympia Brad Vanderhorn (Mike O’Hearn), carefully handwriting letters to the celebrity, and at one point referring to the man as his friend (who never writes back).
If he sounds kind of like a stalker, you wouldn’t be wrong. Killian is an odd young man, a bit of a stunted man-child who lives with and takes care of his ailing grandfather. He works as a bagger at a grocery store and is super-awkward socially. He’s crushing on one of the checkout girls, and in one painful scene tries to chat with her, then flees, then runs back to ask her out. It seems to be out of kindness and a little pity that she calls back to accept a few days later. He can barely hold a conversation on the phone.
His dinner date with Jessie (Haley Bennett) is one of the great scenes of the movie. It goes from wincingly endearing to unnerving in a short amount of time. At this point it’s clear Killian is not well. The steroids give him bursts of rage. He tends to break out into sweat uncontrollably. When trying to film a YouTube video in his garage, he keeps recording even when he’s mysteriously doubled over in pain.
At this point, I was still fully absorbed with Magazine Dreams, but it soon careens into kind of a mess of a story. It can’t seem to decide on its focus, so throws in all sorts of hot topic issues like ‘roid rage, racism, dead parents, vandalism, abuse, and violence—both spontaneous and very calculated. There’s not really a clear arc in the second half as it jumps from Thing to Thing, finally taking a big leap (in my opinion) in the last act. By adding talking point after talking point, the filmmaker tries too hard to cover too many issues in one film, as though it’s inspired by the excess of the sport itself.
But it is definitely worth calling out that Magazine Dreams is completely carried by Jonathan Majors in a fascinating, should-be star-making performance (the film was delayed a couple years after its buzzy Sundance debut when Majors was convicted of DV). He is all-in, in an intense, physical, and often heartbreaking performance. The film is most effective in its quieter moments, when Majors gets to (yes) flex his range as an actor. His Killian is a man who struggles to fit in: a black man in an almost all-white community, a socially awkward guy seemingly on the spectrum, a supremely lonely man who struggles to connect with others, and a man whose obsession is clearly leading him on a path to self destruction. If the movie itself was as focused as Majors’ performance, it could have been a true contender.
