Back in 2023, rising star Jonathan Majors was swinging for the fences and beyond in this colossal, Paul Schrader-esque psychodrama about a would-be bodybuilder, for which role Majors got himself stacked to beast proportions. Many expected it to play a huge part in the awards conversation, with key scenes surely destined to be shown in sizzle reel clips at endless prize ceremonies and invoked in endless op-ed pieces about fragile masculinity. But no. Now it is almost a modern film maudit, all but forgotten, a cursed film only now coming out quietly, and maybe its star is maudit as well.
Majors plays Killian Maddox, an iron-pumping wannabe caring for his disabled grandfather and cultivating a fan obsession with the stars of the bodybuilding circuit. He is particularly keen on a preening beefcake named Brad Vanderhorn, whose magazine covers Killian plasters over the walls of his sad bedroom, and dreams of making it on to these covers himself. Killian is plagued with loneliness, depression and incipient mental illness, body dysmorphia and inability to connect with women. At one point he has a full-tilt, Travis Bickle-style disastrous date with Jessie (Haley Bennett), a co-worker at the supermarket where he has a day-job. And he is addicted to steroids, which trigger terrifying ’roid rage.
But the film and Majors own career were sunk by his 2023 conviction on two counts of assault and harassment against his then girlfriend. The situation seemed worryingly similar to the film’s scenario, only without its fictional reassurances that the man involved was fundamentally gentle. Magazine Dreams itself, though flawed by a cumbersome flashback structure in which he is talking to a counsellor, has powerful moments and Majors is very good, especially in the bizarre scene when Killian insists on going onstage at a bodybuilding event just after being beaten up. The plot twists to an interesting revelation about #MeToo style abuse, although the impact of this too was clouded by Major’s own life. Unclothed, Majors presents an amazing Vesalian anatomy of pain.
