Despite the controversy surrounding Jonathan Majors, this claustrophobic exploration of delusional fame showcases the most powerful performance of his career to date.
★★★★☆
Magazine Dreams arrives after an extended purgatory, shelved for nearly two years past its intended release due to both the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike and the controversies surrounding Majors. Regardless, its eventual release lands like a thunderclap and is not interested in playing by the emotional conventions of a traditional sports drama.
Killian Maddox (played with a frightening, fragile intensity by Majors) dreams of fame on the covers of bodybuilding magazines and a place on the Olympia stage. But he’s not merely carving muscle; he’s building armour. Each rep, injection and mountain-sized meal is a ritualistic attempt to forge an identity strong enough to survive a world that continuously ignores or rejects him. Undeterred by the judges, doctors or just the standard bullies, he strives to be seen and carve meaning out of his life through his legacy, despite the harm it causes him.
At first glance, the film may flirt with the outlines of a classic underdog narrative. But where one might expect a swelling score and a montage leading to triumph akin to that of Rocky, Magazine Dreams offers something far more unsettling. It’s an agonising, feverish character study of ambition rotted from within, a hallucinatory descent into obsession and alienation. Swiftly, you learn that triumph will not be at the end of the tunnel.
The film’s tone is relentlessly bleak; it’s like watching an abandoned animal suffer in plain sight, powerless to intervene. If Requiem for a Dream (2000) left you hollow, this one may leave you raw.
Similarities can be drawn to the anguished psychologies of The Wrestler (2008, another Darren Aronofsky heartbreaker. Like Mickey Rourke’s Randy ‘The Ram’, Killian is a man burdened by his intensity. His ambition to become a sports star is physically harmful, but he’s unable to adapt to a world that offers no space for his pain. Moreover, Magazine Dreams abandons even the faintest glimmer of redemption. It traps us inside Killian’s mind, dominated by isolation and an almost mythic self-image, and denies any catharsis we’ve been conditioned to expect.
However, while Aronofsky grounded his sports tragedy in hyper-realism, Elijah Bynum sets Magazine Dreams firmly in Killian’s inner, surreal world. The sleek, varnished cinematography, coupled with vigilant camera movement, makes the film feel untethered from linear time. It walks a tightrope between naturalism and nightmare; moments of tender realism dissolve into dubious scenarios, and the boundary between perception and delusion becomes increasingly absorbent.
Among the film’s many haunting sequences is a moment in which Killian meets his idol, played by real-life bodybuilding legend Mike O’Hearn (whose natural screen presence is a quiet revelation). Whether or not the encounter occurs is beside the point; what matters is how Killian experiences it, and how that informs his inevitable, somewhat self-made collapse. He is a man so far detached from reality, so infatuated with his dream, that even simple social interactions are a painful struggle.
All this comes through in Majors’ performance, which can only be described as volcanic. While other actors populate the film, this is essentially a one-man play for Majors, and his commitment deserves to be commended. Not only is he colossal with muscle (the Avengers would’ve been in trouble had The Kang Dynasty come to pass), but the emotional balance he constructs for Killian is meticulous. Every flicker of pain, vulnerability and boiling rage is rendered with startling clarity. In a performance that would staple any rising star onto the map, Majors can go from heartbreakingly tender one moment to explosive and flaring with terrifying unpredictability. It’s a portrayal steeped in contradiction, one that demands sympathy even as it unsettles.
Of course, it is impossible to entirely separate the art from the artist, especially here. The extratextual controversy surrounding Majors inevitably refracts through the film’s themes of tangible success ruined by impulsive violence and self-destruction. There is an unnerving meta-irony to his portrayal of a man undone by his unpredictability, and whether that deepens or distracts from the film is up to the viewer. What’s undeniable, however, is that the performance itself is career-defining and, in a different world, would well have been award-worthy.
Despite its psychedelic surface, Magazine Dreams remains achingly true to life in how it visualises the fallout of unmet longing. How many men have we seen, whether online or on street corners, suffering in silence, hiding anguish behind a mask of control, all for their ambitions? The tragedy of Killian Maddox is not purely because he dreams too big (which is undoubtedly one factor in his anguish), but that the world offers no support against his delusion. Every time he reaches out for recognition, purpose, or even love, his grasp slips in depressingly dramatic fashion.
To Bynum’s credit, he never indulges in moralism or pity. Often, Killian walks a hero and villain tightrope reminiscent of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976). Rather than moral clarity, the film offers proximity, its most daring gesture. It places us uncomfortably close to someone whose presence is conflicting but whose pain is contagious. We want Killian to succeed, even as we fear what he might become. We want to reach into the screen and reassure him, but obviously, we can’t. We’re just spectators to his spiral, and that helplessness lingers long after the credits roll.
The Verdict
Magazine Dreams is not for the faint of heart, nor those seeking catharsis. But it is a devastating, important film that demands to be seen and remembered. The fundamental, aching desire to be seen is profoundly human. Whether or not Majors has a future in Hollywood after this role, he’s left a scar of a performance here. And scars, like dreams, are hard to forget.
Words by Joseph Jenkinson
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