This evaluation was a part of our protection of the 2023 Sundance Movie Pageant. It was written previous to Jonathan Majors’ arrest and conviction for assault.
The Pitch: Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) needs one factor, and one factor solely: To be remembered. Following within the footsteps of his idols (together with one he writes to commonly, performed by four-time Mr. Universe Michael O’Hearn), he’s dedicated himself to bodybuilding, shoving down 6,000 energy of hen breast and pumping iron morning, midday, and evening.
He practices his poses in entrance of cameras, molds his physique to close perfection, rips via steroids like they’re Food regimen Cokes. He chugs protein shakes whereas watching porn, however doesn’t masturbate — whether or not that’s because of steroid-induced impotence or some unspoken sides of his sexuality, we don’t but know. He competes in novice bodybuilding competitions, however judges all the time discover one muscle group or one other to criticize, which he then assaults with determined, singular vigor.
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Even after we first meet him in Elijah Bynum’s sophomore characteristic (the primary was the Timothee Chalamet-starring Sizzling Summer season Nights), Killian’s already a person on the brink. He’s shy, withdrawn, however vulnerable to violent suits and is already beneath the supervision of a involved therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris). He has no buddies, and his grocery retailer coworkers (save for one good lady, performed by Haley Bennett) and prospects look proper via him. All he has, all he can management, is his physique. And even that’s reaching its limits, which can ship him spiraling down darker and darker paths.
Enjoying within the Majors: Cinematic research in obsession and ambition are nothing new. Save for the bodybuilding angle, there’s loads in Journal Goals that’ll look acquainted to people who’ve seen the whole lot from Whiplash to Pumping Iron, character research about individuals who commit themselves to a singular objective as a manner of being remembered, irrespective of the price in each different space of their lives.
Bynum’s characteristic exists comfortably inside this territory, nevertheless it’s extra all-encompassing than that: Bodybuilding is our entry level, however via that lens we’re handled to a research in isolation, radicalization, and the gradual chipping away of a person’s soul via the masculine codes that strip away his help programs. Killian’s room is painted with bodybuilding posters, aspirational portraits of not possible physique that it’s tough, if not deeply unhealthy, to comprehend. And but, that is exactly what he’s going to do, at the same time as steroids rip via his liver and a lifetime of frustrations flip his mind right into a maladjusted soup.
On high of all that, Killian’s Blackness is tackled head-on, albeit in a manner that makes it really feel like only one extra log added to the funeral pyre of his psyche. The larger (and, because of his ‘roids, the angrier) he will get, the extra his Blackness turns into a legal responsibility. White prospects glare at him on the grocery retailer, irate contractors beat him and name him an “ape,” and incidents with the police go as violently as you might think about.
Killian tries to pump his manner via all of that ache, resulting in a few of the movie’s most arresting sequences — together with one the place he races to a contest, blood nonetheless streaming from his face after a beating, determined to carry out. As arduous as his life is, he needs to belong. He needs to be liked, and needs all his work to be rewarded. As a result of irrespective of how good he appears, he merely can’t love himself. Bynum’s method to this component of Killian’s psyche is attention-grabbing, however doesn’t get the identical sense of completion as the whole lot else.
God Assist the Beast In Me: That gulf between actuality and self-perception proves a few of Journal Goals’ best components, particularly as the remainder of the solid, all in comparatively minor roles, step again to let Majors and his physique do the speaking. Within the opening minutes, The King cinematographer Adam Arkapaw introduces him to us backlit in opposition to amber stage lights, each rippled muscle and drop of sweat on show for our consumption. It’s an deliberately eroticized picture, fetishizing Majors’ Black physique and alluring us to eat it precisely the best way he needs. However then we determine simply how sad Killian is with it, how a lot he and society at giant scrutinizes it, and it opens up Bynum to take his protagonist on a way more damaging journey within the movie’s barely much less profitable latter half.
As Killian suffers one disappointment after one other — from a disastrous, oversharing date with Bennett’s character to the sexually complicated dynamic that develops between him and his bodily idol — the movie out of the blue turns in the direction of extra violent, Taxi Driver territory, which might be way more attention-grabbing if the movie had the area to discover these components. Majors handles these adjustments capably, calibrating the identical shark-eyed dedication he takes to weightlifting as he does to creating scenes at diners or fantasizing about punishing those that’ve made him really feel lower than. However he’s doing a number of the script’s heavy lifting, particularly because the climax builds to one thing as overlong as it’s anticlimactic.
The Verdict: At occasions, Journal Goals feels as juiced and overstuffed as its protagonist, packed to the gills with Issues to Say about bodybuilding, masculinity, loneliness, and Blackness in America, and never fairly having the highway to cope with all of those points in sufficient element. However for all its unrelenting grimness, it’s not possible to look away from Majors’ unimaginable, titanic efficiency — each downcast look, each nervous grin via blood-soaked tooth, each rabid bark of his pissed off outbursts is totally and completely gripping.
The place to Watch: Journal Goals premiered on the 2023 Sundance Movie Pageant. It made its theatrical debut on March twenty first, 2025.