The athlete’s physique is both a marvel and a weapon. Witness Killian Maddox, a bodybuilder whose formidable muscles gleam under golden light. He is a violent man—some might even say “disturbed”—whose chosen profession leads him to use performance-enhancing drugs that further amplify his aggression. Maddox does not make vague threats toward people who run afoul of him. Instead, he specifically tells them that he will split their skull apart and drink their brains like soup—a promise he makes twice over the run of Magazine Dreams, a new movie by the writer-director Elijah Bynum.
For much of the film, Maddox, who is played by Jonathan Majors, does not seem capable of acknowledging his capacity for violence. This dismissive attitude would be unnerving in any dramatic character study, but unlike earlier cult classics about angry men in search of belonging, Magazine Dreams comes with a different context. The movie has been mired in controversy since shortly after it first debuted to a standing ovation and positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023, when Majors was a rapidly rising star. Two months later, he was arrested and charged with assault and harassment following a dispute with his then-girlfriend, the actor Grace Jabbari. Majors denied the allegations, but Magazine Dreams was dropped by its original distributor amid the fallout. And within the year, a jury had found him guilty on two of four charges—one harassment violation and one misdemeanor assault charge. The Magazine Dreams release seemed uncertain until last October, when it was acquired by Briarcliff Entertainment, the distributor behind the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice.
Ahead of the movie’s delayed release, Majors has attempted to re-ingratiate himself with Hollywood decision makers and the viewing public, dominating the Magazine Dreams press run with interviews that emphasize his personal growth. The PR blitz draws attention to an uncanny parallel with his character. Magazine Dreams is a film about a man who constantly puts himself on display for others to judge: All Maddox wants is to be the best bodybuilder alive. But sheer athleticism won’t turn him into a celebrity, and his demeanor doesn’t endear him to people—Majors plays Maddox as a sullen and tightly wound outcast whose environment shapes his isolation. The athlete is not just socially inept; in several scenes, he either deliberately misleads or aggresses people who do attempt to engage him.
Whereas the character fails to earn the admiration of those around him, the embattled actor is trying to prove that he can do it successfully in real life. The Magazine Dreams press run has seen Majors portraying himself as a flawed but fundamentally good man who can transcend his past misbehavior. Several high-profile celebrities have come forward to say that they have faith in him as an actor and a man; in interviews, Majors has spoken about leaning on religion, and he sports a new tattoo that reads rebirth. And a week before the film’s theatrical release, The Hollywood Reporter published a cover story in which Majors was asked what he would say to entertainment-industry figures now, as he looks to rebuild a once-promising career. “I would tell them I’m still learning,” the actor said, “and I would thank them for participating in my growth.”
Although some of these features do quote dissenting voices, the stories have largely positioned Majors as a fallen man who just might deserve to reclaim his mantle—someone who, perhaps, has suffered enough already. If this redemptive rhetoric feels familiar, it’s because several other men have tried to stage industry comebacks using similar language. “They’re using all the hot-button words,” one crisis-communications consultant said of Majors’s team in an interview with New York magazine. A supporting cast of women has also helped burnish Majors’s image, in part by reinforcing the actor’s view of himself as an important pillar of the Black community—the kind of charismatic male leader we all need. Majors has repeatedly denied any allegations of violence against women, but last month, Rolling Stone reported on an audio recording in which Majors appears to admit to strangling Jabbari. When asked by Complex how he felt about the audio emerging so close to the film’s release, Majors defaulted to platitudes: “There were vibrations, reverberations, same as everything before,” he said. “But I was happy I’d done my work. I was happy I’d done my work.”
The spectacle of Majors’s redemption tour has certainly overshadowed the work of the Magazine Dreams creative team and crew, as well as that of the rest of the cast. Ironically, the film is at its most compelling when it explores the deadly implications of male entitlement. The question that hangs over the screenplay is not if Maddox’s desolation will metastasize into violence, but when. Maddox struggles to connect with nearly everyone around him, especially women: When other characters ask him about himself, he either becomes tongue-tied, deflects the questions, or responds with an overwhelming barrage of information.
A date with his grocery-store co-worker, a cheerful young white woman who seems genuinely interested in him, ends on a sour note after he scares her off with an eerily matter-of-fact description of his parents’ deaths. (Maddox’s father killed his mother, and then himself.) Two uneasy sexual encounters leave him even more adrift: In one of them, a Black sex worker chastises Maddox for kissing her; the woman’s contempt, coupled with his own steroid-induced erectile dysfunction, induces palpable shame. Before the scene abruptly ends, it feels fraught with the clichéd possibility of Maddox unleashing his rage on the woman. As the story progresses, we watch as rejection or perceived disrespect plunges Maddox further into a spiral that seems destined to end with bloodshed, whether realized or simply threatened. Magazine Dreams is not always deft or subtle in its approach, but it does attempt to seriously dig into weighty, complicated material.
And yet, Majors’s press run suggests a distance between the actor and some of the film’s core elements—a blind spot that distracts from the work itself. In an interview with Variety, Majors responded to a comment about Maddox’s crushing solitude and the on-screen violence by asking where the reporter sees violence in the film. (There are several such scenes in Magazine Dreams, and some involve Majors’s face and body being covered with blood; after the journalist cited some, Majors clarified that he believes audiences have the right to perceive art as they see fit.) As Magazine Dreams progresses, Maddox descends further into his antisocial tendencies and grows more destructive. Majors has argued that this kind of behavior stems primarily from loneliness: In the Variety interview, he said that society uses “positive-sounding attributes” such as “lone wolf” and “Alpha male” to describe toxic masculinity, making it difficult for men—once they are on their own—to “get back without help.”
But Magazine Dreams doesn’t revolve around a character who’s simply been abandoned by nearly everyone. The film depicts a man whose ego isolates him and prevents him from forging genuine bonds—who pushes people away with his obfuscation, lies, and single-minded pursuit of fame through physical strength. Even before he commits any violence, Maddox conveys an inability to see himself as more than his body, or to accept any response from the outside world but praise. In that sense, the question of separating Majors, or his conviction, from the movie he headlines feels like a moot one. For some viewers with knowledge of his off-screen reputation, watching Majors radiate quiet hostility in Magazine Dreams may already make the all-consuming performance difficult to evaluate in a vacuum. And even for those who might be able to separate art from artist, the actor’s seeming lack of introspection about how violence is threaded through his film is an artistic failing. No training regimen can compensate for that.
