The New Yorker:

In “Magazine Dreams,” the actor—who was found guilty of assault—plays a bodybuilder undone by the pressures of image-making. Majors has relied on the slippage between character and actor to facilitate his rebrand.

By Doreen St. Félix

What decade is “Magazine Dreams,” a spiritually stifled drama about a bodybuilder driven to fits of chemically induced rage, set in? In the early moments of the film, written and directed by Elijah Bynum, everything about the fashion, the setting, and the subject suggests the late seventies. Standing in the gaping maw of a garage is an Adonis, the bodybuilder Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors). He is Black, but he appears blue in the suburban nighttime; he is muscled not merely by biology but by his own intervention. He wears short shorts and ringer socks, his hairline uncarved. He flexes for us. Inside his modest ranch-style home, his grandfather, Paw Paw, sits at the kitchen table staring blankly as an oxygen tank assists his lungs. The house is claustrophobic, containing one body at peak physique and the other at near-deterioration. Killian has turned the house into something of a shrine to his labor of body modification, plastering his bedroom walls with bodybuilding posters. In the outside world, he is awkward. He’s got a menial job at a grocery store, where he strains to secure the attention of Jessie (Haley Bennett), a diminutive blond cashier, whom Killian believes will deliver him from his purgatory of maladaptation.

And then this seeming period piece about aggression and psychological projection pulls a trick. Killian logs on to a computer and lurks in YouTube comment sections with other bodybuilding obsessives. Later, he Googles “How do you make people like you?” The man is of our time, and not. Bynum borrows the style and psychic mood of postwar American pop cinema to win us over, to add another layer to his otherwise basic male-rage parable. But he can’t seem to get “Magazine Dreams” to say something original. The film is naked Scorsese propaganda—“The King of Comedy” as much as “Taxi Driver”—but that’s not the only reason it feels reductive. The movie tries so hard to put forth a sweeping treatise on the paradox of a Black bodybuilder, to be a study of Black masculinity. Killian is an object who wants to be a subject. He’s not just masculine—he’s animalesque, growling as he pumps his iron. But it is he who gets beaten up throughout the first two-thirds of the film. The steroids prevent him from performing sexually; he’s essentially a eunuch, who wants to be seen as a buck.

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