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.
How should we react to this Black man, an embodiment of our prejudiced fears toward Black men? This figure, who writes letters of adulation to a white bodybuilder—literally named Brad—and who has no real Black family around him? (Paw Paw is experiencing mental decline, and Killian’s parents are dead.) The camera’s interest in Killian is a physiognomic interest. No one else in this movie is Black like Killian. Practicing his mandatory poses in the mirror, the chest bulging and the arms curled, the focal point is always his face, which mangles every expression, which cannot produce the pinup smile. Majors is working out his beliefs about aggression and loneliness and how they destroy his character, as he gnashes his blood-stained teeth.
His mouth is full of blood, at that point, because he has sustained a beating by a group of white men. (Killian had taken a bat to their storefront, believing they’d cheated Paw Paw during a painting job.) After the beating, a long pan stalks Killian, who manages to get in his car and drive to a bodybuilding competition. Bloodied and limping, to the horror of the judges, he attempts to hit his carrousel of poses, until he collapses, until the body gives out.
Bynum has made a physical film about an existential fear; as the film develops, we sense Richard Wright’s novel of racial alienation, “Native Son,” exacting an influence as strong as Scorsese’s. The film makes gestures to the systems of oppression that have driven Killian mad, but they are perfunctory. Deep in his descent, Killian comes across one of the white men who beat him; the man is having a meal at a diner with his family. Killian rants incoherently—“African! Black! Negro! Nigger!”—scaring the man’s children, becoming the stereotype. The thinking is that, for Black adult filmgoers, this Bigger Thomas fan fiction might be enough.
The film begins and ends with the physical presence of Majors, and the film fails because of it. “Magazine Dreams” is as obsessed with the spectacularity of the flesh as its character is; the film leans on a tragic backstory to explain why Killian can’t mix with the world. He is the product of pure patriarchal violence: his father killed his mother and then himself. Rattling off his biography to Jessie, who has agreed to go out with him, Killian gives a mannered, halting speech, the words vomited rather than spoken. (Jessie disappears halfway through the date.) At one point, when he feels wronged—and he always feels wronged—he almost whispers to his target, “I’m going to split your skull open and drink your brains like soup.” His cruelty is the cruelty of the naïf. As the film reaches its ending, the double entendre of the title reveals itself. Killian procures a gun arsenal. It’s Bynum’s way of exploring a kind of cross-racial contamination; Killian uses white men’s violence to facilitate a Black man’s vengeance. Or does he? “Magazine Dreams” won’t commit. Killian’s expression of violence, his expression of his existence, may have been real or may have been a fantasy cooked up in his addled head.
I remember the talk around this film before it premièred at Sundance, back in January, 2023. The script did not intrigue as much as the casting of Majors. He had, by the early twenty-tens, completed a rare and coveted ascension in Hollywood. Industry people and critics alike thought of Majors as a race-man savior, the sort of talent that stirs inchoate comparisons to Sidney Poitier. He had pedigree, having graduated from the Yale School of Drama, but he also had an earthbound, solemn air—he didn’t seem like a millennial cupcake actor. He started with indies. As the doe-eyed playwright in Joe Talbot’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” Majors, in a tweed jacket and slouched button-downs, brought back the romanticism of the Black bohemian. The actor transitioned to mainstream movies elegantly, retaining a sense of dignity. In Spike Lee’s Vietnam War drama, “Da 5 Bloods,” Majors pulled focus from veteran actors, including Danny Glover and Delroy Lindo. He, too, instantly appealed to Black filmgoers; there wasn’t a fear that he would cross over and forget them.
He was a favorite son, and favorite sons aren’t easily abandoned. On March 25, 2023, Majors was arrested in New York City. He was charged with strangulation, assault, and the harassment of his then girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, who, at the time, was unknown to the public. Her finger was fractured, and she had a cut behind her left ear. By then, Majors was a mainstay in the trades, having appeared as charismatic villains in “Creed III” and the Marvel film “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” The charges came as a real shock. Black women, in particular, had vaunted Majors for his emotional intelligence; the allegations of such vivid intimate-partner violence meant that he had taken advantage of their desire to protect him.
“Magazine Dreams,” which was slated to première that year, got dropped by its distributor, Searchlight Pictures. Majors’s management and his P.R. team also dropped him. Many of the film and television projects he had signed onto evaporated. Majors took some time away from interviews, but he did not remove himself from the spotlight. He instead entered a very public relationship with a Black actress, Meagan Good. Paparazzi captured the two holding hands, looking smitten. Good, a former child actress beloved for her canny roles, lent her reputation to the embattled man. Memorably, Majors once described her as his “Coretta,” as in Coretta Scott King. He likes inflating himself, casting himself as a martyr figure; during the domestic-violence trial, text messages between Jabbari and Majors show him admonishing Jabbari for not being a “Coretta” or a “Michelle,” as in Obama. Actors have special license to this mode of narcissism.
Did Majors’s public displays of so-called Black love, which occurred during the trial, prey on the public’s desire to protect one of their few Black male stars? The presence of Good, standing by her man, cast doubt on Jabbari, who is white, and helped create a counter-narrative: that a good Black man had been bamboozled by a conniving white woman. An atmosphere of conspiracy encircled Majors, Jabbari, and the trial, which occurred in late 2023. The release of CCTV surveillance footage from the night showed Jabbari running after Majors. Some pop-culture analysts took this to mean that Jabbari was the aggressor. At the same time, outlets diligently reported a troubling history of Majors’s volatility. Two of his former girlfriends spoke to the Times; one accused him of physical abuse, and the other of emotional abuse. Meanwhile, Majors continued his romance with Good, who provided a kind of dubious moral cover. Receiving the “Perseverance Award” at the Impact Awards (a show put on by a gossip blogger) last year, he got teary-eyed, praising Good for supporting him. “I’m imperfect,” he said. “I have shortcomings.”
In December, 2023, Majors was found guilty of two misdemeanor charges in the Jabbari case. (The two later settled a federal lawsuit.) Still, he maintained that “My hands have never struck a woman, ever.” Briarcliff Entertainment acquired the distribution rights to “Magazine Dreams,” which was released in late March, facilitating one of the more disturbing redemption tours in the wake of #MeToo reportage. A kind of eloquent self-flagellation colors his appearances and his interviews; he believes himself a victim of the genius that possesses him, that makes him vulnerable to a life of pain and suffering. He is the cover star of the March issue of The Hollywood Reporter, in which he details childhood abuse and his devotion to his punishing craft. The writer interviews Majors’s past girlfriends, but their testimonies are drowned out by the glamour of his supporters, who include Matthew McConaughey, Michael B. Jordan, and Whoopi Goldberg. “You don’t get to say sorry these days,” Goldberg lamented in reference to Majors’s plight. When did Majors apologize? Just days after the Hollywood Reporter profile was published, Rolling Stone produced audio of Majors admitting to assaulting Jabbari, back in 2022. “I’m ashamed I’ve ever . . . I’ve never [been] aggressive with a woman before,” he says in the recording. “I’ve never aggressed a woman—I aggressed you.”
The day after this clip was published, Majors and Good got married. The two pretend to a Black power-couple stance. His comeback tour has leaned on this, as well as the slippage between character and actor, to facilitate his rebrand. Majors recently appeared on Sherri Shepherd’s show, promoting “Magazine Dreams.” Shepherd was weeping, thanking him for his portrayal of a young Black man who is, as Majors put it, “mentally different”—like her own son, she adds. Shepard asks about the leaked recording. “God has a plan,” Major replies, “and sometimes you just throw your hands up.” Majors has a plan, too. ♦
