When critics say Jonathan Majors gives a "committed" performance in Elijah Bynum's brutal character study Magazine Dreams, they mean the actor plows through physical, emotional and psychological terrains with a competence and complexity lesser actors would only get partly right.
Majors -- whose bright career was scuttled by his conviction two years ago on charges of domestic abuse -- convincingly sells the whole persona of his damaged bodybuilder, Killian Maddox, and the man's pursuit of perfection, recognition, acceptance, maybe even human connection despite not wanting to be touched.
Majors spends much of the film in his skivvies, posing in front of the mirror, recording clunky workout reels for social media, or in the gym, pounding out reps and cursing himself. He pushes steroids into his hip and does lines of cocaine to get him through his training, all while caring for his ailing, war-veteran grandfather, played by Harrison Page. Maddox is a loaded, imposing powder keg, and audiences will sit anxiously waiting for the explosion. The brilliance of the film is the blast doesn't come in the expected ways.
Maddox's mental illness will be immediately clear to observant audiences, but nonetheless it is affirmed by his counselor (Harriet Sansom Harris), who can barely contain her painful worry about the young, likely schizophrenic who struggles with murderous ideation.
His attempts at outreach are cringe-inducing -- he sends mash notes to his bodybuilding idol (Michael O'Hearn), whom he eventually meets, and moons over a young supermarket cashier (Haley Bennett), a co-worker Maddox asks on a date in THE most awkward proposition I've seen on film in quite some time. Both of these explorations are bruising disasters for very different reasons, but each pushes the volatile Maddox close to the edge.
Bynum's film, his first major feature, is being compared, favorably mostly, with Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver (1976). Magazine Dreams simmers and steams and occasionally boils over. Majors delivers every level of intensity, leaving audiences pummeled and breathless.
It's a bravura performance in an unnerving and exhausting film, tough going from start to finish.
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