Elijah Bynum’s “Magazine Dreams” opens on images of a man in on a runaway as his barely-clothed body is embraced by light. It’s a warm yet lonely image, and that contradiction invests it with tension. The image is a fantasy of success and transcendence, as Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) wants desperately to be Mr. Olympia, gracing magazines as the next bodybuilder phenomenon.
But we know early on that we are not watching a movie about success.
“Magazine Dreams” is in the mold of Paul Schrader’s cinema of lonely men who’re committed to causes to which the world is mercilessly indifferent. These broken men want to be seen. Sensing their brokenness, they yearn for success as means of compensation, hoping to sample the sense of belonging that many seem to take for granted. Denied that, they often achieve catharsis through violence.
Bynum and Majors tweak the Schrader formula in a few significant fashions, notably in terms of Killian’s appearance. Anyone who has seen “Creed III” knows that Majors is in extraordinary shape. This guy is built like a god, according Killian’s fantasies a bit of dignity. Killian is not the pasty, under- or overweight dweeb of most incel stories, and that detail alone challenges certain social conventions. You might watch “Magazine Dreams” and wonder why a guy this attractive can’t get it together, and then you may in turn wonder if refuting such thoughts is Bynum’s point.
Unlike many actors playing incels, including Robert De Niro in “The King of Comedy” and Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,” Majors shows you the charm and grace that Killian could have in another context, perhaps a different world. There are fleeting moments in which Killian does connect with people, his sweetness at odds with his profound alienation and probable mental illness. This sweet awkwardness renders Killian’s failures to connect all the more poignant, as we see possibility, which is an unpredictable counterpoint to Killian’s desolation and volatility. This is a kitty cat in a lion’s body, and Majors gives a vivid, astonishingly unpredictable performance.
The angry male loner movie, as cemented in contemporary American cinema by the Schrader-scripted “Taxi Driver,” adheres to a limited formula that “Magazine Dreams” doesn’t quite transcend. The details of Killian’s psychological disturbance are luridly stacked. As in many of these movies concerned with God’s lonely man, the character’s isolation feels like an excuse for the filmmakers to deny their movie other voices or complications. Killian lives with his grandfather, who is conveniently oblivious to his escalating taste for violence. Killian works at a grocery store, which doesn’t explain his ability to afford a 6,000-calorie-a-day diet. Killian eventually meets his hero, Mr. Olympia 1993, Brad Vanderhorn (played by real-life bodybuilder Mike O’Hearn), and the details of that rendezvous are intriguing yet unconvincing.
The film’s single track—following Killian’s endless adventures in disappointment and rejection—grows redundant. You’re put in the uncomfortable position of wanting Killian to kill somebody so that the movie can affirm its formula and get on with it. Still, Bynum continues to spring charged and surprising scenes, especially a showstopper in which Killian confronts in a café someone who assaulted him. That assault is shocking as well, and it explodes Bynum’s carefully sustained and surprisingly subtle sense of racial tension. Killian is Black, and little is made of that here … until it is.
Bynum’s direction is impressive but on loan from other hot dog wunderkinds. The widescreen vistas of urban malaise, dotted with artful lens flares, are from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” John Carpenter’s most everything he made in the 1970s and ‘80s, and 1970s-era American cinema in general. A set piece, in which Killian flees the assault and runs straight to a bodybuilding competition, weds the climax of Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash” with a tracking shot from PTA’s “Magnolia.” What must be the most quoted shot from a movie to be released over the last decade—that upside tracking shot from Ari Aster’s “Midsommer,” itself in dialogue with the endlessly pilfered opening of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”—appears here as well. And so on.
Bynum clearly wants to be one of the next big-deal auteurs, and that yearning syncs up with Killian’s need to be a bodybuilder. Bodybuilding is a metaphor for filmmaking, as Bynum doesn’t seem to be especially interested in the profession on its own terms. This movie has little of the everyday texture that animated, say, the wrestling world of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler.” And yet a film with this much emotional and visual ambition is to be applauded. I suspect that we will hear from Bynum again soon.
Will we hear from Majors again? The release of “Magazine Dreams,” after two years of delays in the wake of his conviction of two counts of reckless assault and harassment, is the opening salvo of an attempted comeback. I will not litigate Majors’ personal life one way or another, but he is a gifted actor, seemingly carrying the emotions of his characters in his pores.
Yearning for connection and accomplishment also courses through Christopher Wilcha’s endearingly eccentric mid-life crisis documentary “Flipside.” By many accounts, Wilcha is a success: a director of advertisements and docs with A-listers like Judd Apatow and Ira Glass and David Milch within his reach. But Wilcha wanted to be an esteemed documentarian in the Errol Morris mode, which never shook out as project after project fell apart. Wilcha prioritized supporting his family over his art, and for that crime of responsible normality he castigates himself.
Wilcha is suffering from a much milder variation of the disease that afflicts Killian in “Magazine Dreams:” the conviction that being himself isn’t enough. The realization that one is a conventional person can be a difficult pill, which many of us must swallow as our 20s give way to our 30s and 40s and beyond. “Flipside” is driven by a raw need to flush the pipes, as Wilcha stuffs it with the remnants of abandoned projects for closure. This film will exist by any means necessary, and that urgency is poignant.
The nucleus of “Flipside” is a record store of the same name in New Jersey, where Wilcha worked as a teenager. It is one of those places that is stuffed to the gills with arcane bric-a-brac, where people pop in randomly and stay for hours. It’s one of those gloriously tactile places that our present dystopia of airborne media has increasingly less room for. You look at these images of Flipside and can smell the dust; that attic smell that suggests to a nostalgic Gen X’er a return to home.
Flipside is of course struggling in the modern climate, and Wilcha hangs out there while making room for the documentary that he once tried to make of the jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who waxes elegantly here in archive footage of the shadows and light of his iconic work. There is footage of Milch, the co-creator of “NYPD Blue” and creator of “Deadwood,” among many others, as he now battles Alzheimer’s. There is footage of Glass trading his “This American Life” podcast for a stint of trying to get a dance show off the ground. These threads are united by feelings of regret and uncertainty, by a need to get art out there regardless of whether or not it fits your exacting and self-censoring standards. An archive interview with Milch, before illness, contains a statement with an existential ring to it: Do not be hemmed in by the writer that you think you are.
“Flipside” is catnip, then, for people who suspect that they are failed artists and cowards of convention, though normies should be moved as well by the pall of middle-age that hangs over it. To Wilcha’s credit, “Flipside” is never maudlin or self-pitying. It’s free-associational, wry, and optimistic. The 1990s are over, Gen X’ers and Millennials, we must face it. But we are not dead yet. What many of us need to recognize, regardless of our generation, is that we are our own prison. When are you gonna be ready for parole?
“Magazine Dreams” is now in theaters. “Flipside” is streaming everywhere, including for free at Tubi and, for subscribers, The Criterion Channel.
