‘Magazine Dreams’ is too shallow and glossy to be Jonathan Majors’ comeback

In “Magazine Dreams,” Jonathan Majors plays a volatile bodybuilder named Killian Maddox, presumably because the writer and director Elijah Bynum thought calling the character Murderguy Sulkface was too on the nose. This downbeat drama is as overwrought as Killian’s muscles — it’s a steroidal portrait of a man in distress.

Why is Killian so upset? There are a few reasons, all of which are given the same narrative weight (which is to say, little) even as they range in scale from surviving domestic violence to mean comments on his workout videos. Mainly, it’s a movie about looking at someone without really seeing them. Bynum invites us to gawk at Killian’s physique — every ab is lit with devotion of a commercial for hot-buttered dinner rolls — and then critiques people who can’t see the vulnerability under his rock-hard surface.

I’ve seen the film twice now, first when it premiered at Sundance in 2023, then again more recently, and I still can’t see into Killian. He’s angry, frustrated and opaque. Bynum’s script lumps him in with a litany of issues facing lonely young men: misconceptions about masculinity, an inability to connect with women, a pressure to leave a mark on the world, easy access to guns.

“Magazine Dreams” was shelved when Majors was found guilty of harassment and assault and dropped by his management team and Marvel. Now, it’s circled around as his comeback. I can’t think of a more ill-advised choice than this flimsy film that wields pity like a sledgehammer, that puts no stock in the anger-management techniques that were a part of Majors’ sentence. (“I’m not raising my voice,” Killian repeats like a drill.) The problem isn’t the film inadvertently echoes reality and Majors’ own history of childhood trauma, his drive to push himself to perfection. It’s that the movie’s insights into all of this are so shallow that they make a human being feel phony by association.

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Mostly Killian is just awkward and lost, particularly at the hands of his creator, who’s written him to blunder through scenes like he’s freshly hatched from an egg. Killian doesn’t know how anything works. A grocery store employee, he cluelessly flirts with a co-worker, Jessie (Haley Bennett), by having her ring up his chicken breast and telling her to keep the change. He’s on some combination of drugs — a shot and a powder — and it’s a mystery how he’s figured out how to buy them because pretty much every interpersonal encounter seems to be something he’s doing for the very first time. Unironically, his life seems to be karaoking the Eminem song “Stan,” with Killian scribbling increasingly unhinged letters to his favorite bodybuilder (TikTok sensation Mike O’Hearn) signed “Your number one fan.” Maybe he doesn’t know the song. He listens to death metal.

Having blended “Taxi Driver” and “Rocky” into a smoothie, “Magazine Dreams” doesn’t give us much of a reason to invest in this guy. Killian lives a repetitive existence: He gets his feelings hurt, he stress-eats and he acts out. The cycle gets wobblier but it doesn’t change. He’s fixated on a competition judge who, back in 2016, called his deltoids small. That timestamp plus a few quick internet references are the only proof that this isn’t a period piece. Otherwise, Killian is surrounded by VHS tapes and staticky TV sets and landlines with the ostensible excuse that he lives with his grandpa, William (Harrison Page). Like every other unnatural choice, I suspect it’s mostly for aesthetics.

You feel the director’s thumbs on every frame, squeezing out any life or lightness or air. The tone is relentless, and the score of slow and craggy strings is a dirge. At least visually, the cinematography is stunning with saturated reds, blues and amber oranges, as well as nifty focus racks that do a lovely job of telling us where to look. The camera is almost never not on Majors’ Killian. But what exactly are we supposed to see?

I half-expect that the film will eventually defend itself by saying that it takes place in Killian’s ’roided-out psychosis. That’s the only way to explain how its bodybuilding exhibitions look like Shakespeare performances, with balconies of people applauding nonstop as a soloist flexes onstage. Nothing and no one feels real, including minor characters like a streetwalker (Taylour Paige, coolly enduring a thankless role) in a ridiculous costume of sequins and furs.

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When the script decides we need to care more about Killian, he’ll suddenly turn charming, as when he smoothly orders half the menu at a steakhouse. And when the script decides it needs more tension, he transforms into a confident criminal. Incredulously, he not only destroys property and holds one victim at gunpoint (all while unmasked and dropping obvious clues as to his identity), he also gets away with it without a whiff of legal consequence.

Those sequences are clumsily counterbalanced by real-world grievances about how strangers treat a large Black man. Cops harass Killian when he’s simply jogging. Later, when Killian triggers a ferocious tit-for-tat with Ken (Bradley Stryker), the owner of a construction company, the man calls him an ape. It’s an awful, hurtful moment. But I’m not sure of the film’s intentions when Killian responds by flinging food, scaring Ken’s kids and pacing the room as though it were a cage. Where is Bynum placing the audience in that scene? With Killian and his justified rage — or with the bystanders who merely see him acting like an animal?

There are too many competing, clashing ideas that go unexamined. Bynum uses allusions like anvils, following up that sour note by cueing the ballad “The Beast in Me” by Nick Lowe. He also has Killian ransack his house to an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Samson & Delilah,” a reference that only half-works because no woman in here has ever betrayed him. (One man does, but mostly Killian is his own worst enemy.) When he does go on a date with Bennett’s Jessie, things naturally go awry. Bynum keeps the camera on her as Jessie crumples her face in her hands. We sense this is only her latest disappointment. It’s the best scene in the movie.

Majors gives his whole self to this exercise. Even if you only ever see a still frame, the effort Majors has put into looking the part is a testimony to his discipline. He holds the movie up, grimacing, sweating, screaming, so that every beat feels more important than it is. It stings to see how much he’s trying to make this script mean something. The performance has pounds of ego in it too. When I first saw “Magazine Dreams” two years ago, it was my least favorite role Majors had ever done — and I’d made a point to see every one of them, to be there for the entire arc of his career. It felt like we were witnessing the ascension of a star who’d light up Hollywood for decades.

Anyone who’s read more than one Hollywood biography knows that there are performers who get into the business to make their broken parts feel whole. Subsuming themselves inside a character, exploring ugly emotions in a safe setting — these are ways to fuse reality to fiction and create empathy. I’m just a critic and certainly no psychologist, but on my second watch of “Magazine Dreams,” it felt like Majors was sharing a piece of his own pain. I wish the film had allowed him, and his character, a chance to exhale.