Magazine Dreams

“Magazine Dreams” is a dark drama in the vein of “Taxi Driver,” Martin Scorsese’s film about a disturbed cabbie named Travis Bickle who projects his damage onto the world. There have been a lot of movies in that mode, starting with 1970’s “Joe” (about a couple of reactionaries who hate hippies enough to murder them) and continuing through “Rolling Thunder,” “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” “Chapter 27,” “I Shot Andy Warhol,” “The Fan,” “Big Fan,” “Down in the Valley” and “Drive.” The alienated loner in this one is an amateur bodybuilder named Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) who experienced a psyche-shattering incident of violence in his childhood and is also coping with probable mental illness, anger management issues, sexual dysfunction, economic hardship, a simmering hatred of people he thinks of as oppressors, and the burden of being a caregiver.

There are a few dream sequences in the film, but these don’t always immediately register as such, because writer-director Elijah Bynum and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (“True Detective” Season 1) have lit and filmed Killian’s story in an expressionist neo-noir style. This, too, is “Taxi Driver”-esque. So are a firing range scene where the camera flies at the hero; scenes of Killian working out with weights and consuming massive amounts of food and steroids (echoing Travis preparing for urban warfare); and a sequence in which Killian invites his supermarket coworker on a date that he ruins just by being himself. There’s also narration in the form of Killian’s letters to a world-famous bodybuilder he’s obsessed with. And so on. The homages and borrowings—not just from Scorsese’s oeuvre but other widely-seen films, including a brazen lift from “Boogie Nights”—constrict the movie and prevent it from breathing on its own.