The conundrum of ‘Magazine Dreams’

Jonathan Majors’ long-delayed film is a dark, dynamic tour de force. I have very mixed feelings about even reviewing it.

Magazine Dreams had one of the stranger trajectories to the screen of any film arriving this season. The second film by writer/director Elijah Bynum, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, two years ago, and drew some of the fest’s most positive notices, with special praise reserved for the lead performance by Jonathan Majors.

The film was acquired by Searchlight Pictures and set for a December release. A big awards push was planned for the film and Majors in particular. But of course, Majors was arrested in March of that year for assaulting a former girlfriend. Later that year, he was convicted of assault and harassment and fired from his role as the main villain in the upcoming Marvel movies. Magazine Dreams was ultimately pulled from the schedule and dropped by Searchlight.

Now, Magazine Dreams is here, opening in theaters this Friday. Two years after its Sundance debut, it was picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor starting to get a reputation for picking up projects that no one else will (they also released The Apprentice). Majors has resurfaced, giving a series of interviews—including a long sitdown with the Hollywood Reporter in which he revealed he’d been abused as a child—and likely receiving better PR advice than he did throughout 2023.

I have greatly admired Majors’ work in the past. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a small masterpiece, and he was one of the better parts of Spike Lee’s underrated Da 5 Bloods. I thought Majors did interesting work in the Marvel universe. I was literally at a screening of Creed III, out in the lobby getting my kids popcorn, when I got the news alert that Majors — who played the villain in the movie I was in the middle of watching — had been arrested.

Of course, it also turns out that… Magazine Dreams is quite good, and Majors is pretty great in it.

It’s a dark, moody drama, one that owes quite a bit to Taxi Driver, among other clear influences; it’s a much, much better Taxi Driver riff than either Joker movie.

Majors stars as Killian Maddox, a troubled young man who works in a store but dreams of becoming a bodybuilder. Awkward and possibly on the spectrum, and seemingly much better at putting on muscle than he is at most other functions in life, Killian frequently writes letters to bodybuilding star Brad Vanderhorn (Mike O’Hearn), that recall Stan’s letters to Eminem.

He also goes on a date with a coworker (Haley Bennett) that’s so awkward it makes Travis Bickle’s strip club jaunt with Cybill Shepherd look smooth. The delay meant that last year’s Love Lies Bleeding, another story about a dysfunctional bodybuilder, beat it to the screen, but there’s plenty here that’s highly original.

The film is sad, intense, and tragic, and also shows a filmmaker, Bynum, who really knows what he’s doing and seems to have a bright future. And yes, Majors does some of the best work of his career. No, the character is not exactly like Majors- he’s not an actor, or famous, or accused of quite the same things. But he is dark, with a temper, and violent. What we know about him might even add to the power of the performance, although this is going to be hard for a lot of people to get past.

And therein lies my personal conundrum as a critic.

I have no objection to Magazine Dreams being released. I was willing to watch it and to review it and give my honest opinion. If the crime Jonathan Majors was convicted of bothers you to the point where you don’t want to see the movie, I completely understand and that’s fine.

But in writing a positive review of the film, I feel like I’m in some small way assisting in Jonathan Majors’ comeback/redemption narrative, and I don’t really have any interest in doing that.

It just seems a bit quick. Sure, the type of crime Majors was convicted isn’t quite a death sentence for an actor’s career. But it’s barely been a year, and I get the sense that’s being put aside a bit too quickly.

In an age when #MeToo is declining, and men who have been accused of horrific crimes against women — Andrew Tate, Conner McGregor, Trevor Bauer — are celebrated and greeted in some corners as heroes, I feel like the pendulum has swung way back in the other direction towards easy forgiveness for men who do horrific things to women, if not outright denial that they did anything wrong at all (seriously- read some of those Andrew Tate apologetics and try not to lose your faith in the goodness of humanity.) There’s even now an effort to clear Harvey Weinstein’s “good” name.

Plus- by hitting a woman and getting arrested, Jonathan Majors kind of screwed over both himself and everyone he worked with on the film, which might have seriously competed for Oscars if not for his misdeeds. Elijah Bynum might have gotten opportunities, a year or two ago, that he didn’t get.

When I heard Magazine Dreams was finally being released, I think I joked that I might ask to see if Majors was giving interviews. Because as recently as a year or two ago, the idea of someone having been convicted that recently of a violent crime against a woman doing the press rounds to promote a movie would have been unthinkable.

But doing interviews, Majors has been.

And that might be what bothers me most here. In the week that both Magazine Dreams and Snow White are coming out, I’d say Jonathan Majors has enjoyed a more sympathetic airing in the media than either Gal Gadot or Rachel Zegler- two people who, for all the silly reasons people hate them, have never been convicted of any violent crime. Is that fair?