It should come as no surprise that
Magazine Dreams is being compared to
Taxi Driver. Both films are about lonely obsessive unstable men that are prone to violent outbursts. At this point, what movie about lonely men isn’t inspired by
Taxi Driver in some way? It’s almost lazy to make that comparison in 2025 but there are so many similar beats, moments, and shots between both films that it has to be mentioned.
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| Taxi Driver / Magazine Dreams |
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Taxi Driver / Magazine Dreams
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Taxi Driver / Magazine Dreams
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Taxi Driver / Magazine Dreams
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Taxi Driver / Magazine Dreams
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Taxi Driver / Magazine Dreams
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These are just the visual similarities. Both Travis Bickle and Jonathan Majors’ Killian Maddux have an unhealthy desensitized obsession with pornography (Travis frequents porn theaters and Killian casually watches online porn at home). A major difference between
Magazine Dreams and
Taxi Driver is the presence of the internet. Killian Maddux spends a good amount of time on online forums which is the film’s attempt at touching on incel culture and it’s negative effect on young men (casting real life bodybuilder Mike O’Hearn was a nice touch considering he’s such a meme-fied figure in online incel/sigma culture). It’s almost like
Magazine Dreams is yet another movie showing you what Travis Bickle would be doing with his spare time if he existed in the age of the internet (
Manodrome, The Beast, Fight Club, Paul Dano’s Riddler in
The Batman, Joaquin Phoenix’s
Joker, etc etc). The difference between
Magazine Dreams and most of the aforementioned movies is that Killian Maddux is a bit more rooted in reality compared to The Riddler or The Joker. I say
Magazine Dreams is a bit more rooted in reality and not completely rooted because at a certain point it starts to feel like a 2 hour snuff film. The basic story follows a mentally unstable young man obsessed with being a champion body builder. Being a young man comes with challenges. Being a young Black man comes with a few more potential challenges. Life throws you curveballs even when you coast through it on default mode. But as the movies goes on you start to ask yourself; “what else could possibly go wrong with this young man’s life” …and then it gets worse. I don’t want to spoil anything but if you list everything that happens to Killian in the movie, you sort of say to yourself; “Jesus christ. Is this guy gonna catch a break?” At a certain point it stops feeling like a movie and more like Black male struggle/torture porn. I’m starting to understand why the director of the
Iron Claw chose to exclude Chris Von Erich from the tragic Von Erich story. Would anyone, especially non-wrestling fans, want to sit through a movie where five brothers all die in a short span of time? It really happened but it just seems so unbelievable that it could be seen as distracting. Killian Maddux is the insect slowly having his limbs torn apart or burned under a magnifying glass by a sadistic little kid. To be clear - that’s not necessarily a negative criticism. Perhaps that was the director’s goal. This isn’t the type of movie you watch to “enjoy” and not everything needs to be easily digested.
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The Substance /
Love Lies Bleeding /
Magazine Dreams |
This would pair well
Love Lies Bleeding, The Substance, and other recent films that show the dark side of obsession. Love Lies Bleeding and Magazine are first cousins in that both movies use bodybuilding and steroids as a backdrop. But like I said before –
Magazine Dreams is rooted in reality whereas the other films straddle the line between reality and total fantasy.
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Love Lies Bleeding / Magazine Dreams
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Love Lies Bleeding / Magazine Dreams
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It also makes sense that Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy produced this. At times,
Magazine Dreams feels like
Nightcrawler if Lou didn’t win in the end.
I feel obligated to share my thoughts on
Magazine Dreams. I have an immense sense of hometown pride and the director is from my hometown (
read my thoughts on Annie Baker’s Janet Planet while you’re here). I love seeing anyone from Amherst, Massachusetts doing great things. Due to Jonathan Major’s legal issues this movie almost got shelved which would have been unfortunate for all the other people involved in the making of it (they didn’t do anything wrong, so why should their work have to be “cancelled”?)
I don’t mind folks using this movie as a jump-off to talk about the Venn Diagram between mental health, gender and race as long as folks are aware this story is not in any way a representation of the average Black male experience. If anything, one could draw a parallel between the events in the movie and the issues surrounding Jonathan Majors' real life.
