Magazine Dreams
Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Destination vs. Journey
Searchlight Pictures
Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams is an intense, deeply unsettling psychological thriller, superbly anchored by Jonathan Major’s performance as manic-muscleman Killian Maddox. Majors transforms his physique into a Hellenistic statue—a feat in and of itself—and yet he feels human: a guy you might see at the gym or the grocery store, awkward, uncertain, trapped between society’s expectations and his own. Maddox is a tortured soul. Desperate for approval, he’s the antihero we root for despite his delusions. The film’s deft mix of sympathy and revulsion creates riveting suspense—like watching a slow-motion train wreck—but these thrills have a Catch 22. Magazine Dreams so effectively rachets up anticipation that we expect a big payoff; instead, we get gratuitous violence and multiple endings. For some, this may break the spell … but what a spell.
Magazine Dreams is, unexpectedly, an emotional joy ride. Kudos to Writer/Director Bynum for his tension-building mastery; to Jason Hill for his otherworldly score; to Adam Arkapaw for his immersive cinematography—and, above all, to Jonathan Majors as Maddox, for pulling us inexorably into his distorted headspace.
This film is all about yearning. Killian Maddox dreams of being seen; his quest for bodybuilding fame comes from a deep need for human connection. Tragically, despite his prodigious size, his destiny may be invisibility—or worse. The poor guy has zero rizz. He’s so clueless that he googles how to make people like him. At first, he exudes endearing shyness, but his dogged ambition leads to a crescendo of dead ends: unrequited fan-mail to a body-building idol; a bungled dinner date with a co-worker; attempted romance with a sex worker; grandiose lies to a therapist; a blind rage defense of his beloved “Paw-Paw.” With each failure, his self-loathing feeds the darkness within—and even so, we sympathize.
Majors first turned heads in 2019 for his performance as Mont Allen in The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Here, he takes a swing for the fences: more Infinitely Polar Bear than Hulk, by way of Taxi Driver, his painful realism has earned him the right to his own real-life magazine covers. As for the rest of Magazine Dreams’ talented cast—including Haley Bennett , Taylour Paige, Harrison Page, and Harriet Sansom Harris—they don’t have as much to work with as Majors, but serve as excellent foils for his searing agita, public freak-outs and shocking brutality.
There’s something deliciously sinful about watching Maddox implode. Laughing in spite of our own best instincts, we feel every palpable minute of his downward spiral. Akin to neo-noir Nightcrawler—another ‘misguided loner’ story written by Magazine Dreams producer Dan Gilroy—this film’s carefully-curated blend of dread and discomfort allows us to live a bad behavior fantasy. The same way gamers run over pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto, or rubberneckers slow down to ogle a car-crash, viewers will be glued to Magazine Dreams. To what end? Where Nightcrawler delivered a scathing critique of capitalism, this film broadly attacks the American Dream—more specifically, the unquenchable thirst for visibility in our fame-obsessed culture—with nods to mental illness, systemic racism, body dysmorphia and toxic masculinity. But these are mere nods: deliberately coy about the lead character’s backstory, Dreams never lets us plumb his psyche deeply enough for a fully-formed takeaway.
In sum, it’s the ending that disappoints—which is a shame, because Bynum and Majors are so good at depicting the horror of escalating emotional struggles. Instead of a Raging Bull-level character study, Magazine Dreams feels more interested in beefing up tension. Instead of making one daring choice and risking certain debate—did it go too far, or not far enough—this film makes five or six choices too many, lessening the impact and muddling the takeaway. Even worse are the incel clichés: one scene goes full Joker, only to retcon it in the next. We’re relieved, then confused, then left hanging.
So is this film worth the journey? Ironically, yes.
Despite its overstuffed finale, Magazine Dreams enthralls. By bringing Maddox to life, it creates a Frankenstein-stand-in for all those neurodivergents who fill our own lives: people we don’t know whether to help, avoid, or help by avoiding. People we don’t expect to become. By allowing us to inhabit the unseen, it sheds light on our own unspoken yearnings. At its best, Magazine Dreams transcends its own formula, encouraging kinship with marginal characters, inspiring us to look deeper ... not just into their psyches, but into our own.
Reviewed at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
124 min. Pending release by Searchlight Pictures.