If you thought Joker owed a lot to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, you ain't seen nothing yet. Writer/director Eljah Bynum's Magazine Dreams is so indebted to those Scorsese movies (along with a couple of other obvious influences) that it makes Todd Phillips' film seem like a work of staggering originality by comparison. But for all its nods and homages, Magazine Dreams is a movie that keeps us engaged thanks to a fascinating central performance and a narrative that plays like a slow motion car crash from which we simply can't look away.
Bynum has taken the classic Paul Schrader "God's lonely man" template and given it a twist by applying it not to the usual embittered middle class white man but to a hulking African-American bodybuilder. Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) is a twenty-something man-child man-mountain who lives with his sickly grandfather, works part-time at a grocery store and devotes every other minute of his life to honing his physique through a combination of intense physical exercise and steroid abuse, the latter of which has taken its toll on both his body and his mind.
Like Joker did with its title character, Magazine Dreams is quick to condemn America's notoriously failed mental health system, opening with a post-hospitalised Killian being interrogated by a well-meaning but ultimately useless counsellor (Harriet Sansom Harris). From the evidence of his behaviour she quotes and his reluctance to engage, it's clear Killian is in no fit mental state to play an active role in society, but he's cast into the wind regardless.
Taking its cues from King of Comedy, Magazine Dreams sees Killian live a Rupert Pupkin-esque fantasy life, repeatedly writing needy letters to his idol, top competitive bodybuilder Brad Vanderhorn (Mike O'Hearn), each unanswered letter growing more passive aggressive in tone. He records a show on bodybuilding tips in his grandfather's basement, but unlike Pupkin, who only had lifeless mannequins for an audience, Killian is subjected to instant ridicule in the form of YouTube comments.
Just as Killian increasingly inflicts damage on his body, so too does the film spend two hours physically battering and emotionally bruising its protagonist. Episodic in structure, Magazine Dreams is a series of scenes in which Killian takes either a literal or metaphorical beating. Each encounter he has with the human world he longs to be a part of is more difficult to watch than the last. Killian is Frankenstein's Monster, and the rest of the world is the little girl he drowns because he doesn't know how to play.
Some scenes are recognisably derivative, like the Travis Bickle-esque Killian's failed dinner date with a naive co-worker (Haley Bennet), a disastrous audition straight out of Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, and various meltdowns that recall Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, albeit played very much straight here. But what makes Magazine Dreams stand on its own is its reworking of well-worn tropes onto a black male protagonist. Early on, when Killian takes his place on stage at a bodybuilding tournament alongside other musclebound black men, it's impossible not to feel like you're watching an antebellum slave auction, as every exposed ebony muscle is evaluated by a group of mostly white judges. In its own crude way, Bynum's film has something to say about America's hypocritical relationship to black male physicality. Killian's impressive physique is both admired and feared, drawing applause at bodybuilding events while causing white women to clutch their handbags more tightly in his presence.
The unfortunate elephant in the room is now Majors, given his repulsive offscreen behaviour, which led to the movie being shelved for two years. But Majors is undoubtedly the film's greatest asset. His is a performance that veers between making us nauseous to earning our sympathy, often in the space of a single scene. Killian is the sort of man we try our best to avoid, a walking human timebomb, and we witness him do some terrible things here. Majors doesn't make Killian likeable (and perhaps the actor's offscreen baggage contributes to this), but we always feel sorry for him as a man cast aside by an uncaring system. In this way, Magazine Dreams does a far better job of holding society accountable for the monsters its creates than Joker.
Directed by: Elijah Bynum
Starring: Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige, Harrison Page, Harriet Sansom Harris, Mike O'Hearn
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