SUNDANCE23 REVIEW: Magazine Dreams [2025]

Rating: R | Runtime: 123 minutes
Release Date: March 21st, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Briarcliff Entertainment
Director(s): Elijah Bynum
Writer(s): Elijah Bynum

You have to do something big and important, or nobody will remember you when you’re dead.

Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams is a case where there are so many great things happening that are ultimately let down by execution. The towering performance from Jonathan Majors as an amateur bodybuilder named Killian Maddox who hides his crippling fear and trauma behind giant muscles.

The depiction of loneliness via obsession wherein everything this man uses to approximate an identity while shielding his insecurities can find no conduit towards understanding beyond unanswered fan mail sent to his idol (Michael O’Hearn’s Brad) because that passion terrifies anyone who is willing to listen. And the compulsion to be seen ultimately triggering an unbridled rage born from PTSD and drug use that he simply cannot control. Each piece of this puzzle holds immense power.

The puzzle itself, however, is marred by what feels like a desire to toy with the audience. Bynum throws so many examples of suffering that this character has plastered upon the inner walls of his mind like the posters of bodybuilders adorning his room that you can’t blame him for wanting to see each one through to its endgame, but at some point they all just blur together as a repetitive exercise of delayed gratification.

Because he litters the film with allusions to mass killings and antisocial behavior. He sets the stage for Killian to become one more monster who forces us to forget his own victimization by being remembered as evil incarnate before pushing the payoff to the next potential venue again and again. The tension he so wonderfully builds eventually evaporates to nothing.

It’s a structural problem that unfortunately gets in the way of some unforgettable scenes—scenes so good that you can’t blame Bynum and company for wanting to keep them all despite their thematic and narrative overlap. The first hour is all about Killian pushing himself outside his comfort zone to finally try and commune with the world around him only to have it backfire in destructive ways that are wholly his fault despite still earning our genuine sympathy.

The second hour is conversely a journey towards reckoning wherein his justified anger starts to take over by leading him down a dark path his psyche can’t fully comprehend due to a past that scared him into becoming the beast his younger self needed for protection under the guise of a beauty most don’t recognize like he can.

After spending all this time and effort to become nothing more than a meme, Killian decides to embrace that beast and confront his critics and abusers. It’s a heartbreaking transition mired by a threat of guns when his physique is enough to earn the reaction he seeks. A diner scene where he snaps is so much more potent because it doesn’t use props. One where he confronts a man who he believes wronged him is equally strong, but it would have been without the weapon in his hands too.

I assume the reason is to differentiate the “man who freaks people out” from the “man with the gun who wants to freak people out”, but the anticipation born from the inclusion of firearms and the raw nerve implication of a mass shooting overshadows the poignant resolution that arrives instead.