The Work of Magazine Dreams
A review of the best bodybuilding movie most people will never see
There's always a moment when a fighting man knows it's over. The punches don't connect anymore. The legs won't move. The body betrays the heart. That moment comes for Killian Maddox in Magazine Dreams when, following a beating at the hands of some people he had previously threatened, he passes out on stage, muscles painted with competition oil, head spinning with steroids and concussion after-effects. They drag him away. The "magazine dream" appears to die there, but it will be resurrected. For someone like Killian, it always is.
Magazine Dreams, which my friend Marcus Charleston kept urging me to see, is the movie bodybuilding deserves. Not the memorable but heavily edited and stylized Pumping Iron documentary I talked about on NPR. Not the fun, cartoonish villainy of Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. This is the dark heart of the sport exposed for what it is: a collection of emotionally damaged men destroying themselves for a spotlight that will never shine on nearly all of them.
I've been looking for this movie. When I reviewed Love Lies Bleeding, I complained about its stylish veneer that left viewers hungry an hour later. Though she certainly looked the part of a 1980s muscle mommy, its protagonist Jackie felt like a missed opportunity, a character who should have been a delusional junkie-in-the-making but instead became just another dreamlike A24 archetype. Love Lies Bleeding skimmed the surface of low-end bodybuilding culture. Magazine Dreams drowns in it.
The comparison to The Wrestler is inevitable but insufficient. Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson at least had glory days to look back on. His tragedy was past tense playing out in the tense present. Killian Maddox, played with terrifying commitment by cancel-culture casualty Jonathan Majors,1 has no past glory. His tragedy is present tense, ongoing, relentless.
Majors transformed himself for this role, eating 6,000+ calories daily of chicken/broccoli/rice, using the appropriate "supplements," and training several hours a day for four months.2 The result is the desperate, not-quite-frame-appropriate bulk of a confused man who believes size equals worth. Veins snake across his shoulders. His neck thickens until his head seems too small for his body. His face carries the blank look and stupid smile of the perpetually overtrained.
The plot follows poor, poor, pitiful Killian, a grocery store worker whose entire near-NEET life is consumed by bodybuilding. He lives with his grandfather after losing his parents to murder-suicide. He writes endless letters to his idol, a bodybuilding champion named Brad Vanderhorn, played by ageless "natural" bodybuilder Mike O'Hearn. The letters go unanswered. Killian keeps writing them.
What makes Magazine Dreams succeed where Love Lies Bleeding and Pain & Gain fell short is its thoroughly unflinching portrayal of bodybuilding's emptiness. When I revisited Pain & Gain, I noted that Bay's film occasionally had me convinced I was watching a minor masterpiece in its portrayal of post-Pumping Iron muscle-manliness. But Bay is an action director at heart and couldn't resist turning his bodybuilders into technicolor criminals. Magazine Dreams gives us something more honest: the portrait of a man whose entire identity is wrapped up in muscles that nobody cares about (or should care about, for that matter).
The scene that captures this best isn't the violence, though there's plenty. It's when Killian takes out Jessie, a coworker played by Haley Bennett. The date is excruciating. Killian talks about his parents' deaths, then launches into a tedious monologue about bodybuilding that sends Jessie fleeing. In that moment, we see that Killian has nothing to offer the world except his obsession. He has no conversation, no charm, no life outside the gym. He has devoted himself entirely to a pursuit that offers no reward.
Unlike the female protagonists in Love Lies Bleeding, who had each other to love, Killian has no one. His isolation isn't romantic or sexy. It's pathetic. He pays for sex with a woman who won't kiss him, then is unable to perform. He fantasizes about fame that never comes. When his hero Brad finally calls and invites him to a photoshoot, the encounter ends in anonymous sex, with Brad using Killian's body and discarding him afterward.
The violence that does permeate Magazine Dreams isn't thrilling or stylized. It's sad and inevitable. Killian threatens a painter who refused to repaint his grandfather's house. He's beaten by the painter's nephew and his buddies before the local bodybuilding show. He buys guns and assembles them with the same methodical care he applies to his workout routine. When he breaks into a critical judge's home and orders him to strip and pose at gunpoint, it's not shocking. It's the logical conclusion of a life devoted to physical domination.
The film's most powerful sequence comes when Killian attends Brad's posing show armed with a gun. Director Elijah Bynum shows us Killian imagining the cold-blooded, deeply satisfying murder of Brad on stage. Despite all his rage, he doesn't do it. Even in his madness, he can't destroy his false idol. The worship of graven images, of autoandrophlic muscle man love, of chemically-constituted "alphas" … it’s all too ingrained.
In the end, Killian finds himself back at home, weeping in his grandfather's arms. He takes apart his gun and flushes his steroids. Then comes the final scene, with Killian back in his garage, flexing, voicing the same delusional "magazine dreams" again. Nothing has changed. We know in our hearts that he will buy more steroids and fail more times, more completely each time. The cycle will continue. This is what makes Magazine Dreams the definitive bodybuilding film. It shows that, for so many lost boys like Killian, this melancholy, timepassing pursuit has no end, no victory, no salvation. He is a terminal case.
The film had a troubled journey. It premiered at Sundance in January 2023, only for Searchlight Pictures to drop it after assault allegations emerged against Majors (the real consequences of which were Majors lost out on tens of millions of MCU dollars and the MCU, already faltering in the latest phase of its way-overplayed run, got a chance to recalibrate around a new villain). It sat on a shelf until Briarcliff Entertainment rescued it and slated it for a March 2025 release. The box office was lousy, just over $700,000 on opening weekend when distributors hoped for at least $1 million. By May 2025, it had barely passed $1.1 million (I paid to watch a streaming rental of it). People didn't want to see this movie. Maybe because Majors had been convicted in the court of public opinion. Maybe because nobody wants to see a movie about bodybuilding — already a weird, fringe pursuit at the competitive rather than the Instagram influencer level — much less tha unvarnished truth about it (if you want to dig deeper, read Alan Klein’s excellent ethnographic study, Little Big Men).
It must be noted that this is the best movie transformation for this specific role that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen (and written) about most of them. Majors truly resembles a low-level NPC bodybuilder who will forever remain out of contention for his pro card. Remarkable!
Ouch. The date scene was tougher to watch than the stage scene. Dude was like a little kid trying to impress his mom. Sad.
If Majors hadn’t done whatever her did (choked or hit his gf?) he’d have gotten an Oscar nomination for this.