Elijah Bynum’s dark sports drama follows a bodybuilder on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2023.
Killian (Jonathan Majors) lives with his veteran grandfather and is obsessed with bodybuilding, taking a break from it only to work at a supermarket and visit a counsellor appointed by the court to help with his anger management. At the gym, Killian takes excessive amounts of steroids to build the body of his dreams and make it onto magazine covers. He struggles with social interactions and is lonely, so there is no one to stop him in his destructive attempts to make history.
Like Martin Scorsese’s cult Taxi Driver (1976) and its parody double The King of Comedy (1982), Elijah Bynum’s film explores the points of tension in today’s America: emotional and physical violence, economic hardship, racial prejudice, easy access to arms and drugs, abuse of power, online hate, and body image stereotypes. All of these social issues feed the unhealthy fantasies of the sociopath protagonist, revealing to the viewer repressed aggression and a fragile masculinity needing constant reassurance behind huge muscles.
In 2023, only a few months after the film’s premiere, upcoming Hollywood star Majors was accused of assault and harassment. The parallels between Magazine Dreams
and reality became an additional commentary on the issues discussed in the film.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Magazine Dreams
Director: Elijah Bynum
USA, 2023. 123 min.
18+