Magazine Dreams is an attention-grabbing drama that comes inside inches of real perception. As a story of male physique picture, it’s uniquely poised to dig right into a topic few different American movies have touched. But as a have a look at how ache and humiliation can construct like a strain cooker, it sadly fizzles out. At instances, it captures self-destruction within the vein of Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash or Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or Black Swan – all movies about individuals’s minds and our bodies being shattered by their obsessions. But in the end, it comes down safely on the facet of prescriptive storytelling moderately than going full-tilt with its most visceral and disturbing potentialities.
Written and directed by Elijah Bynum, Magazine Dreams follows socially awkward LA bodybuilder Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors), who Bynum and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw introduce as a bodily specimen first and a personality second. We meet him on a stage surrounded by fellow muscle males, backed by classical music and bathed in golden mild. As he poses, a dreamy haze frames his spectacular physique in silhouette; the digital camera worships Maddox’s chiseled kind as if he had been a Greek god forged in marble.
This is how Maddox needs to be seen. Internally, nevertheless, he’s in fixed anguish, demonstrated by the way in which he can barely ask out Jessie (Haley Bennett), the shy girl who works at a grocery store with him, with out stammering and crumbling in on himself. When he lastly does, their first date shortly goes from hilariously awkward to intensely disagreeable, then verging on eerie. The extra Jessie tries to attach with Maddox the extra his anxieties flip his focus inward, shifting the dialog to his desires of gracing journal covers (therefore the title), similar to the jacked idols whose footage grace his bed room wall.
Majors’ efficiency turns every intrusive thought into shackles of deep self-loathing that Maddox can’t fairly shake off. These bubble to the floor as troubled, obsessive outbursts, which the actor wields with a terrifying unpredictability. (This makes it just a little harder for many who observe the information to not view Magazine Dreams via the lens of Majors’ conviction on prices of assault and harassment.)
There is, nevertheless, temporary respite to be discovered. The solely particular person Maddox appears snug round is his ailing grandfather, William (Harrison Page), a chilled presence and Maddox’s North Star in the case of determining easy methods to be man. Then once more, the expertise that almost all outlined William was the Vietnam War, so regardless of Page’s candy and inspiring demeanor, the knowledge that his character imparts winds up instilling a army strictness in his grandson’s strategy to consuming, figuring out, and different, extra clandestine elements of the bodybuilding way of life (i.e. steroid injections). He even refers to mundane duties as “leaping within the trenches and going through the enemy.”
It’s no shock, then, that when the world’s apathy and unkindness come down arduous on his shoulders, Maddox instantly responds with aggression. His inner violence is simply as discomforting as his outbursts, given how Bynum captures the main points of his routine: the pained smile he places on when he strains himself on stage, or the joyless manner he treats meals as mere gas for muscle development. Meanwhile, the way in which a thick, milky protein shake dribbles down his chin, coupled with these hunky posters on his wall, means that Maddox’s obsession with the male kind may go deeper than his skilled ambitions. But regardless of presenting quite a few homoerotic photos in shut proximity, Magazine Dreams pulls its punches with something associated to Maddox’s attraction to males, together with the head-scratching choice to depict key moments of advanced intimacy with a person whose physique he admires totally off-screen.
It’s as if Magazine Dreams is afraid of committing to all its difficult, confrontational concepts about cycles of masculine violence, and would moderately trace at them as a substitute. After Maddox is pushed to (and even previous) his bodily and emotional limits, the query of how explosively he may reply looms massive within the foreground, however are by no means answered. The result’s a movie that doesn’t hassle getting its fingers soiled.
