The People’s Joker : The (Unofficial) Joker Movie of the Year Is Already Here

Courtesy of Altered Innocence

The closest thing to genuine social satire about the massively popular and about-to-be-sequelized 2019 motion picture Joker is that it won two Academy Awards, firmly and semi-inexplicably confirming movies about a murderous lord of gimmick crime as the only consistent awards-bait in the world of comic-book cinema. No one has ever won (or even been nominated for) an Oscar for playing Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, or Iron Man. But two different actors now have Oscars for playing versions of Batman's nemesis, and the sequel has attracted a trophy-chasing Lady Gaga—which means the new, decidedly not Warner Bros.-released indie movie The People’s Joker isn’t just messing with copyright-protected IP but daring to travesty increasingly rare big-studio prestige. Here’s the thing, though: The People’s Joker, a crowdsourced DIY project from director-cowriter-star Vera Drew based on her experiences as a trans woman in comedy, is a better Joker movie than Joker. Batman nerds should be flocking to their local arthouse, demanding to see it like it was a Snyder Cut.

Drew’s project, which began life as an actual re-edit of the Todd Philips/Joaquin Phoenix film, is part fan-fic, part autobiographical one-woman show, and part parody—with that last bit doing the legal heavy lifting required to release an unauthorized comic-book adaptation in commercial theaters. Drew plays Joker the Harlequin, a trans woman who moves to Gotham City with hopes of joining the cast of an unfunny government-sanctioned comedy program called UCB Live (naturally, Batman is a friend of the show, positioned like the various politicians who drop in to gladhand on SNL). The movie follows her “anti-comedy” career, the full awakening of her gender identity, and an intoxicating and then toxic relationship, among other trials, all using a cast of Batman characters. Versions of the Penguin, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Bane, and various Robins all appear, in addition to some deeper-cut figures borrowed from the Superman mythos. The fantastical settings and many passages of animation—SNL guru Lorne Michaels is an all-CG character in the movie—are provided via crowdsourcing and copious greenscreening. Some of this stuff looks cool, some of it is pretty hideous, and some of it looks intentionally hideous. (The IRL live-action makeup, however, is uniformly pleasing.)

Making Joker the hero of the story and Batman something of a corporate-stooge villain isn’t novel on its own, nor is pitting Joker against a sort-of version of herself in the form of toxic boyfriend Mistah J (Kane Distler)—hilariously styled after Jared Leto’s edgelord knockoff from Suicide Squad, although sadly, Distler doesn’t do the imitation Heath Ledger voice. Put together, though, these ideas—as well as smushing the Joker and Harley Quinn characters into a single body, in a movie with plenty of other wannabe clown-comedians running around—offer a new angle on the endless refractions of the Batman mythos, where heroes and villains can’t stop creating cracked variations on each other’s identities. As in the comics, heroes and villains alike rely on their outré gimmicks to distinguish themselves, an assertion of self that takes on newer meaning in the context of trans identity, and the way it can be explored through pop-culture images. (This is also touched upon in Jane Schoenbrun’s upcoming feature I Saw the TV Glow, destined to reach a larger audience via the A24 banner.) Drew has discussed watching Batman Forever as a kid, and realizing she wanted to be Nicole Kidman, not Batman—a moment dramatized in her movie.

Drew further connects that desperation to express one’s true self to that of a comedian consigned to the seemingly pay-to-play hell of UCB classes and SNL striving (the two institutions are more or less conflated), a canny update of the Joker character’s showbiz aspirations. Parody may be the necessary legal description, and The People’s Joker certainly goofs on the various images and incarnations of these famous characters. But while its in-jokes are often funny, the movie ultimately feels like a more sincere, fully-felt act of adaptation than several “real” treatments of these characters.

Like, for example, 2019’s Joker, which feels as stuck as its lead character in outmoded notions of comedy and transgression. The Todd Phillips project attempts an audacious act of elevation: Rather than retelling some funnybook origin story, it sets about reframing the Joker as a product of a gritty 1970s urban landscape, and take inspiration from the films of Martin Scorsese, including both Taxi Driver (maladjusted loner tries to connect with beautiful woman) and The King of Comedy (maladjusted loner tries to tell jokes), even going so far as to cast Robert De Niro, star of both those movies, as a smarmy talk-show host like the one his character stalked in King of Comedy. In doing so, Phillips’ film takes a pratfall into a common “elevated” superhero-media trap, ripping off a bunch of old comic books while vaguely claiming a lack of interest in the form.

No one involved with The People’s Joker could credibly make a case for that kind of fashionable indifference; the movie is absolutely steeped in stylistic and thematic homages to Batman lore of the past, with plot points refashioned from several unrelated comics storylines (Hush; The Dark Knight Returns); shots and sequences nicked and remixed from Batman Forever, Suicide Squad, and Batman Returns; costumes pulling from various Joker and Harley eras; and references to Batman: The Animated Series alongside the previous Batman-lore reference champ, The Lego Batman Movie. Even Batman '89 supporting actor Robert Wuhl turns up, in a cameo arranged via Cameo—in other words, a comic appearing in a comics-based movie about stand-up comics, meta-jokes linked together by supervillain-worthy punmanship.

This is all pretzeled up with high spirits worlds away from the meticulously serious scowling of Joker, a movie that nonetheless sees fit to shoehorn in a Bruce Wayne/Batman origin story, doing the same old thing off to the side of the big King of Comedy homage. What the hell does the Joker really have to do with King of Comedy, anyway, beyond the shared image of a failed comedian? Joker’s Arthur Fleck oscillates from mentally ill to scrappy underdog to deranged ringleader, Phoenix’s performance gamely contorting along with the posturing screenplay; King of Comedy wraps its agonizing desire for fame and recognition so tightly in Rupert Pupkin’s quasi-jovial persona that it feels vastly more dangerous despite far less overt violence.

The People’s Joker has a more inventive, lively relationship with its source materials—and isn’t afraid to admit what those sources are. Even the more garish computer-generated images attempt to reclaim a comic-book sensibility where an artist’s personal and distinctive “line” is – or can be, anyway – more important than polish. Some of the movie’s relationship melodrama does feel abstracted to a fault; it’s technically acted out on screen, but it feels more like we’re hearing it in a monologue in that one-woman show it sometimes resembles—something Vera Drew needs to get off her chest more than material that’s especially vital on its own. (The movie largely sets aside the specific creepiness of the Joker/Harley Quinn relationship in favor of more garden-variety toxicity tropes.) But as a genuine attempt to reclaim the Joker from the edgelord/fanboy sensibility that celebrates him as a truth-telling agent of chaos, somewhere between The Crow and Bill Burr, The People’s Joker works beautifully, reworking all that Batman iconography into a social context that’s at once gloriously, proudly outlandish and deeply wounded. Who among us hasn’t struggled with identity that feels at once immutable and subject to byzantine personal backstory?

A few of DC’s homegrown properties have embraced this self-satirizing continuity madness; the kid-targeted Teen Titans Go! frequently issues razor-sharp swipes at the company’s vast mythology, and in general the company hasn’t been precious about aiming different versions of its characters at toddlers, kids, YA audiences, or grown-ups. Vera Drew is simply taking the next logical step, refracting Batman from the outside (as an unaffiliated creator) and the inside (as an obvious fan) all at once. The uniting factor among the best Jokers and Harleys, whether mostly evil or mostly good, isn’t the willingness to be as figuratively and literally twisted as possible. It’s the unruly joy of performance.

Originally Appeared on GQ