Broken 'Magazine Dreams': The False God of Ambition

Before we begin this review, I have to give a bit of a disclaimer. Magazine Dreams star Jonathan Majors has been in the news a lot lately, and not for good reasons. I’m not going to rehash the court case against him and the new evidence that recently surfaced (a quick Google search will tell you everything you need to know), but I have to mention it because his presence in the movie is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. And that’s okay.

The question of whether to separate the art from the artist has no easy answers, so if you’d rather not see Majors on screen, you have every right to give this film a pass. But my job isn’t to make that decision for you. It’s to judge the movie on its own merits, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to review this film simply as a piece of art, and it’s up to you to weigh that judgement against the real-life drama involving the movie’s lead star.

With that brief caveat out of the way, let’s get the ball rolling. Magazine Dreams was written and directed by Elijah Bynum, and it stars Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige, Harrison Page, Harriet Sansom Harris, and Mike O’Hearn. In the film, Killian Maddox is a bodybuilder with dreams of making it big. He wants his picture to be on magazine covers (hence the name), but as you might be able to guess, his quest for stardom has a dark side.

The guy has given up just about everything–his health, his social life, and eventually, even his mental stability–to achieve his goals. Nothing is going to stop Killian from becoming the next big thing in the bodybuilding world, but soon enough, the sacrifices he’s made are going to catch up to him.

Like a lot of dramas, Magazine Dreams isn’t really about the plot. It’s more about the main character and the ups and downs of his life as he pursues his dream, so this movie rests almost entirely on Jonathan Majors’s shoulders. It’s a lot to ask one man to carry, but thankfully, he’s more than up to the task.

Right from the start, this guy pulls off a pitch-perfect blend of utter determination and almost total brokenness. Whenever Killian is working on his body, he exudes a single-minded resolve that makes you believe he can and will rise to the top, but when he’s doing just about anything else, you can see how broken he really is.

It’s most notable in his interactions with Jessie, a grocery store worker he’s had a crush on for a while. After finally building up the courage to ask her out, their first date is an absolute disaster. Killian’s lack of social skills reach nearly The Office-esque levels of cringeworthy awkwardness, so after just a few minutes, you might find yourself squirming in your seat.

To be fair, a lot of that is due to the great writing, but even top-notch dialogue is worthless if it’s not brought to life by a skillful performer. And like I said before, Majors completely knocks it out of the park. He nails every side of this complex and fascinating character, and when Killian’s ailments and actions begin to catch up with him, the actor doesn’t skip a beat.

To take just one example, there’s a scene where the guy faints on stage during a bodybuilding competition, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think Jonathan Majors really did pass out on camera. From the obviously painful grimaces to the full-body trembling that precedes the fall, this guy perfectly mimics the way your body will slowly give out on you if it takes enough punishment.

That acting masterclass alone is worth the price of admission, but it’s not the only thing Magazine Dreams does well. The movie also uses Majors’s top-tier performance to highlight the thin line separating ambition from obsession. It’s good to have goals, and it’s good to dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to your craft, but if you’re not careful, those dreams can take over your life and become a form of idolatry. Granted, it’s not always clear where that line is, but when you start sacrificing your health and injecting yourself with drugs that turn your temper into a raging fire, you’ve probably gone a bit too far.

All that being said, Magazine Dreams isn’t just a simple cautionary tale. Especially in the second half, this film also highlights the roots of Killian’s single-minded pursuit of bodybuilding perfection, and they’re quite tragic. This guy just wants to be loved, but he thinks he has to earn it by doing something extraordinary. Otherwise, in his mind, he’s simply another worthless nobody.

That deep emotional wound leads him to do some crazy things just so people will like him, but the real tragedy is that he already has the love he so desperately desires. Killian lives with his grandfather, and there’s a scene where he tells the old-timer he’s going to win a competition and make him proud. In response, the man tells Killian that he’s already proud of him, but Killian just keeps walking as if he didn’t even hear it. All he needs to do is accept the love his grandfather wants to give him, but instead, he searches for validation in all the wrong places. It’s a genuinely heartbreaking dynamic, and it contains a number of important lessons we’d all do well to heed.

For instance, it highlights the vital importance of love and human connection, and it shows that we don’t need to be extraordinary to be worthy of love. We deserve it exactly the way we are, so we don’t have to go to unhealthy extremes to justify our existence.

Together with Majors’s great performance, that rich thematic substance makes Magazine Dreams a great watch, but I can’t say it’s a perfect film. No matter how bad life gets for Killian, he doesn’t seem to face any consequences. Sure, he experiences a number of genuine hardships, but every time he does, the movie just mentions them once or twice and then seems to forget they ever happened. Even when he gets into serious legal trouble, nothing appears to come of it, and while your mileage may vary, I simply can’t suspend disbelief quite that much.

Along similar lines, this film also ends on a slightly confused note. I obviously can’t spoil the details, but I can tell you that the final scene suffers from a bit of thematic ambivalence. It takes the lack of consequences to a head-scratching extreme that appears to dilute the movie’s message, so if you ask me, the story should’ve ended a few minutes earlier.

Thankfully though, those problems aren’t nearly egregious enough to ruin the entire experience. They’ll take the movie down a few spots in my end-of-year ranking, but I still had a great time with it. I found Magazine Dreams to be a moving exploration of the dangers of obsession and the emotional scars that cause us to seek validation in what we do rather than who we are, and if you’ve ever experienced similar struggles in your own life, I think this film will resonate with you on a deep level.