IF the entire series of events around Jonathan Majors’s physical assault crimes had not happened and upended his career, the actor would have easily secured awards season nominations and even won some for playing the more troubled Killian Maddox in Magazine Dreams.
Obsessed with bodybuilding, grocery store worker Killian lives each day with the singular goal of sculpting a body fit to be featured in magazines like his bodybuilding hero Brad Vanderhorn (Mike O’Hearn).
Living with his grandfather, Killian has no social or love life. He lacks basic skills to hold conversations with anyone. Killian’s only “friend” is Brad, who he regularly writes letters to in montages akin to Eminem’s Stan music video, despite never receiving a reply.
On top his undiagnosed mental health afflictions, Killian’s psychological problems are made worse by the cocktail of anabolic steroids – or performance-enhancing drugs – that he regularly abuses to achieve his bodybuilding dreams, which naturally takes a toll on his body, leading to an escalating series of breakdowns.
Descent into madness
A common term thrown around for the film is how it is “trauma porn” and for the most part, Magazine Dreams is precisely that. Writer-director Elijah Bynum holds no punches back when it comes to the amount of trauma he subjects viewers to through Killian’s actions.
Magazine Dreams is a hard watch, as any empathy that viewers may have at the film’s start for Killian will quickly erode as the story progresses with each of his explosive episodes of violence or just being outright weird.
Majors himself does an excellent job at capturing Killian, sometimes blurring the lines between whether he is playing a character, or if his own “characteristics” are bleeding into Bynum’s creation.
Standout scenes such as Killian’s first date with a co-worker that devolves into him brusquely talking about his parents’ murder-suicide, and then transitioning into a weird monologue involving bodybuilding or how he ambushes a bodybuilding judge would not have worked without Majors’s inherent intensity and flexibility to switch tones.
The isolation of modern men
The “trauma porn” aside, ironically, Magazine Dreams is, unintentionally or otherwise, the perfect depiction of the modern “male loneliness epidemic” put to film.
Though the film was dropped by its distributors from a 2023 release due to Majors’s controversies, Magazine Dreams finally being released in 2025 is timely.
In an era of heightened awareness on male loneliness and the dangers of it, Magazine Dreams serves as a cautionary tale for how undiagnosed and untreated mental health problems can quickly spiral out of control, especially for individuals such as Killian who have a potent mixture of underlying problems exacerbating each other.
Magazine Dreams is streaming on premium video platforms.
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