Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back in Utah covering the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the premieres are already flowing. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Folks love it when actors transform their bodies for a role – hell, Tom Hanks kept doing it up until it gave him fucking diabetes – but it’s rare occurrence where someone bulks up for another film and then uses that body to go out and make something genuinely challenging. This is the case of Jonathan Majors, whose work I genuinely admire and whose ascent to superstardom I’ve kind of feared, because once Men’s Health puts somebody like him on the cover, you can kind of expect a flatness from their work. He’s got that action-star body now for the one-two-punch of Creed III and his drafting into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I wouldn’t hold it against him for taking payday rolls with stunts and shit – he’d probably still do dope work, even if it ain’t in what he got his start in. But Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams offers proof that Majors isn’t going down that path, with him using that Creed body to make, essentially, its antithesis: a deeply moving and upsetting character piece about a fucked-up bodybuilder with dreams of superstardom who has the drive and the ambition but lacks the kind of grace and confidence that one needs underneath that image. It’s tremendous and ferocious work, beautifully shot and staged, and it is a testament to Majors’ abilities, even if it sometimes makes choices geared more towards keeping that performance going at the expense of “proper narrative plotting” or whatever.
Majors plays Kilian Maddox, who basically fits every dimension of the “gymcel” stereotype without ever resorting to the kind of psychological flatness or its latent political associations implicated in the term. He works tirelessly, almost maniacally, to maintain and grow his already-ample physique, slamming dozens of hard-boiled eggs and protein shakes into his gullet and special sauce into his glutes, the syringes and vials stored in a squirreled-away lunchbox featuring an off-brand Captain America on its front. He lives in a house that feels as if it were preserved in amber in the mid-’80s – to the point that until a laptop and a modern Google browser showed up in the film I’d assumed it was a period piece – and dresses the part, his muscles bulging out from under his wool sweaters and crisp collared shirts as if Carlton Banks had gone all-pro. He lusts after a co-worker at the supermarket, and writes fawning “Stan”-like letters to a bodybuilding icon of his, with all of the parasocial relationship issues that come when a fan demands an answer but is never seemingly ever able to get one. It should be obvious that there is a deep wellspring of pain coursing through Killian’s veins, and we’re immediately informed of it at the film’s start, where he meets with a social worker following a breakdown in which he threatened to split open some nurses’ skulls and “drink their brains.” Majors savors every single one of these details and they emerge in a rich and slow fashion. Robbed of his natural charisma and charm by virtue of Kilian’s awkwardness and the desperation that comes as a second-order effect, he goes as far as possible into the character’s emotional state, oscillating between deeply, painfully empathetic and outright fucking terrifying.
But to Bynum’s credit, this doesn’t become a “trauma” picture like one might be used to and it somehow also eludes the Taxi Driver cliches though it threatens, occasionally, to go there. There’s just not enough room for that with everything else that’s crammed into the film, which sees sports-adjacent cinema (and I mean that in a very broad sense, as you’ll see) as a buffet ripe for the taking. The havoc that the steroids wreak on Kilian’s body are almost fully pulled from Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, complete with high-pitched droning as he clutches his chest and falls. His fantasies take on a form similar to the opening of Raging Bull, though instead of shadowboxing in a ring, he’s posing on a stage under hot lights, with every bit of chiseled muscle highlighted.
There’s a handy bit of Whiplash in there as well (though that’s not sports-related, I guess), and, most intriguingly, a series of twisted references to the canon of Bodybuilder Cinema, such as a scene in which Kilian, having decided to commit a particularly devastating act as a last resort, heads out to a nightclub fashioned in a way meant to evoke Tech Noir, the club that the Terminator shot up in ’84. It also has the Return of the King issue: It has a dozen perfect endings that unfold all in succession, and it chooses the least “exciting” option of them all, even if it might be one of the most interesting choices that Bynum makes. But one can feel every second of Magazine Dreams once it passes the 90-minute mark, though that doesn’t stop Majors and Bynum from making that remaining time compelling. It just becomes kind of exhausting at a certain point, being too much of a good thing.
Yet the more I consider Magazine Dreams‘ faults, the more I’m deeply endeared by it. Bynum’s branching endings allow the story to unfurl in unexpected and unconventional ways, and his usage of cliche serves to juxtapose their incongruities, but it would be all for naught if another actor were in the lead role. Every one of this character’s facets has been geared to highlight all of Majors’ least-obvious strengths as an actor, from his awkward frustration at being unable to grow his legs to his window-smashing rage when he gets into a fight over the phone with a contractor, and the sheer physical pain of his existence, wrapped behind either a frown or a forced grin. There’s even Ellis-like shades of psychological discord – I’m thinking of the bits in American Psycho where Bateman fucks up band histories and other things – when he forgets or alters minor details in conversation (Sting and the NwO were never on Smackdown, and I feel like that’s intentional). But even as he plunges into psychological discord and subsequent violent fantasy and frustration, Majors always keeps one step ahead of any outright hatred sprinting from the audience, always reminding us that This Is A Sinner, Like You, while Bynum ensures that we know that the film hates the sin.
In fact, with regards to its bloat, I’d suggest it was a calculated wager on Bynum’s part: If you have a performance this brilliant, one can take a little pummeling from the bloggers of the world to ensure that as much of it is on screen as possible. He’s holding all of us back with our skepticism and analysis or whatever, just saying let the man cook. And sure enough, what we’re served up will likely be one of the best performances of the year, an excellent antidote to the sublimation Majors will face when he becomes Marvel’s latest overarching heel.