How much do we want another Taxi Driver? Or another Joker, for that matter? That’s a question that a viewer of the new film Magazine Dreams may eventually ask themselves. It’s also a question that the movie seems to pose to itself. The film, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, is a grimly immersive dive into the head of an addled, violent young man, a disaffected, delusional loner who threatens to destroy the bright world that so cruelly denies him access. 

Writer-director Elijah Bynum is no doubt aware of the familiar thematic structure. He leans into those comparisons, then, confident that he’s found a new angle of attack. In crucial ways, he has. His boiling-over antihero, aspiring competitive bodybuilder Killian (Jonathan Majors), is Black, and thus subject to vastly more concrete societal ills and pressures than are the misanthropic Travis Bickles and John Q. Jokers of the cinematic world. And Bynum’s film has a more enlightened awareness of the mental health struggles that push young men into violent ideation. Killian’s journey toward ruin is about a sick, sad world. But it is, rather less nihilistically than Taxi Driver or Joker, also about one sick, sad man.

To play that man, Majors strains himself into a mighty knot. He’s massively bulked up, which is impressive. (Though, maybe that was ultimately for another movie.) More notable is how thoroughly Majors inhabits Killian’s troubled bearing—his tics, his blunt logic, his inflated idea of himself used to block out the consuming pain at his center. This is perhaps the big performance fans of Majors have been waiting for since the Yale Drama grad first splashed onto the scene a few years ago. It’s a towering act of becoming.

But what is all that effort in service of? Bynum has a keen aesthetic eye and employs a sure hand in ratcheting up the physical and existential dread of the film. He alludes to danger early, showing us Killian in court-mandated therapy following some kind of outburst at a hospital. (His therapist is played by the ever invaluable Harriet Sansom Harris.) But then we encounter Killian’s softer side: his stammering sweetness in asking a fellow supermarket employee out on a date, his heartbreakingly childlike fan letters to his bodybuilder idol, his doting care for his ailing grandfather. There is a vulnerable person in there, someone struggling to make a connection. He’s just so hampered, living a life made up of a tragic past, a tragic present, and what looks to be a tragic future. It’s hard to not feel something for that.

Which is perhaps the film’s salient argument. Violent men are sourced from somewhere, after all. Something, or many things, have happened to them. And rather than cordoning off those hurting men—criminalizing their mental plight, mocking it online—shouldn’t we work toward a world (and, yes, a society) that offers them care? As Magazine Dreams unfolds, Bynum tells us in no uncertain terms that his movie could be pointed at some kind of horrible event. He then lets us wonder what an alternative outcome might look like.

I’m not sure if that humanist idea, only pawed at as it is, is enough to overcome the harrowing nature of the film. Magazine Dreams is an incredibly tough sit, in its visceral detail and in the way Bynum agonizingly draws it all out. By a certain point, one questions the film’s sympathy. Killian’s litany of pain—both received and delivered—begins to seem more sadistically torturing than compassionate. Just as Killian flexes in what looks like mortal pain (he’s slowly killing himself with steroids), Bynum relishes in the brutal grind of his film. A movie about the horrors of masculinity does its own kind of macho preening, seeking to awe us with its feats of muscular daring—complete with a heady dash of homoerotic panic.

Who knows what, if any, instructive value a film like Magazine Dreams has in this day and age. Maybe it needn’t have any of that—a gruesome movie can just be a gruesome movie. But I suspect Bynum is trying for more than just a gnarly couple of hours. I’ll have to mull over his film, and maybe force myself to watch it again, to get a grasp on what I think Magazine Dreams is really doing and how well it succeeds in that endeavor. Undeniable after a first visit, though, is that Majors once again proves himself an actor to be reckoned with, an expansive and chameleonic artist who maybe can make some sunny comedy after this. He’s so good at carrying us into the dark of Magazine Dreams that I’d happily, eagerly, gratefully follow him back into the light.