Jonathan Majors’ ‘Magazine Dreams’ Is Now Less a Movie Than a Vessel for Discourse and Debate

The "fallen" star is terrific in this otherwise small-scale drama which saw its value as a likely Oscar nominee undercut by skewed "real life imitates art" circumstances.

Opening this Friday in 800 theaters courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment, Magazine Dreams is a decent movie with a spectacular lead performance. Granted, be it two years ago at Sundance or in multiplexes this weekend, the sole draw for writer/director Elijah Bynum’s drama is its star performance. And in that sense, the film delivers in spades. Jonathan Majors offers up what surely would have been an Oscar-nominated performance had the film opened in, say, November of 2023 sans the circumstances that saw the film get dropped by Searchlight and picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment. In a skewed irony, the film’s strengths don’t exactly mesh with the star’s public and legally adjudicated offscreen behavior in a way that may render it little more than a voyeuristic look at what could have been. It’s now just another movie doomed to be more talked about than seen.