Review: “The People’s Joker”

If I regret one thing about my experience covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, it’s returning my ticket for the Midnight Madness world premiere of Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. My reasons for doing so have nothing to do with the film itself; as a lifelong Batman fan and a bonafide hater of Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker movie, I was incredibly intrigued by the premise of Drew’s fair use parody. But my flight home departed at eight the next morning, and it would have been a tight turnaround getting from a previous movie to The People’s Joker in time; it just seemed like the logical decision.

Logical, sure, but the talk of the festival that last full day I was there was that that night’s premiere of The People’s Joker would be the film’s sole screening. Subsequent planned screenings had been canceled, supposedly due to rights issues, or a rumored cease-and-desist from the copyright holder— even though, as a parody rather than a straight adaptation of DC characters, the film ought to have been protected under fair use. Suffice it to say, there was a span of time where I was resigned to the fact that I was likely never going to have the opportunity to see this movie, and I was kicking myself.

Fortunately, in the nearly two years since that festival, The People’s Joker has had a substantial festival run, and is now rolling out into theaters nationwide. All that attention is warranted, but Drew’s film— even after a good couple years’ worth of hype and speculation— far transcends the controversies surrounding it (even though I love a good story about an indie film sticking it to massive, IP-driven corporations as much as the next person). A project spurred on by friend and future co-writer Bri LeRose’s request that Drew recut Todd Phillips’ (also controversial, for different reasons) derivative and dire 2019 film Joker, The People’s Joker almost immediately reveals itself to be the exact opposite of everything that film, and the majority of comic book movies of late in general, is: radical, original, and— beyond its DIY aesthetic, cutting sense of humor, and anarchic energy— achingly personal.

Drew herself stars as Joker the Harlequin, a closeted trans woman (her deadname is bleeped out anytime it is used over the course of the film, one of many empowering creative choices Drew makes for her coming out, coming-of-age movie) who moves from Smallville, Kansas to Gotham City with dreams of becoming a comedian by joining the cast of UCB (United Clown Bureau) Live, a Saturday Night Live-inspired sketch comedy show that’s sanctioned by the government in a world where comedy has otherwise been outlawed thanks to Batman (Phil Braun); the caped crusader’s actions here are not those of a typical crime-fighter, but of a fascist bent with power, whose appearances in the film credit him as “vigilante/content entrepreneur.” Struggling to make it big in the mainstream, Joker strikes out on her own to form an “anti-comedy” troupe with a band of other outcasts— including fellow comedian Penguin (Nathan Faustyn) and non-binary plant person Ivy (Ruin Carroll)— falls in love with Mr. J (Kane Distler), and steps into her identity and power as a trans woman.

That Drew based so much of The People’s Joker on her own life is evident even without knowing anything about her or her film. Incidents throughout the narrative may recall numerous other queer coming out movies— the dad who doesn’t bother to show up, the mom who can’t wrap her head around having a child whose identity exists outside her idea of normal— but there are conversations, events, and snippets of dialogue that feel too specific not to be somehow rooted in reality. For example, offscreen, Drew has cited her identification with (as opposed to lust for) Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Chase Meridian in Joel Schumacher’s 1995 (as Drew calls it, “big budget gay art”) film Batman Forever as the first clear indicator of her true gender identity, and a parody version of that movie (illustrated through some uncannily-rendered 3D animation and served to us under the unwieldy title Legends of the Caped Crusader and the City of Cybermutants) serves the same purpose for Joker within the film.

What’s really impressive though is how Drew bends existing comic book elements to fit her story so seamlessly. For instance, Dr. Jonathan Crane (Christian Calloway) prescribes the drug Smylex to put a happy face on his patients, regardless of how depressed they are feeling; the protagonist’s mother (played by Lynn Downey) is so disturbed by her child asking her if she could have been born in the wrong body that she whisks her off to Arkham Asylum for this very treatment. Perhaps some of those elements are a little too on-the-nose; that Mr. J’s costuming, a character whose presence in the film as a confident transgender man who serves as a source of inspiration for Joker fast transforms into a rumination on toxic relationships, is almost directly lifted from Jared Leto’s interpretation of the Joker in David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad film (and the trail of abusive behavior left behind both by that character and Leto himself is well-documented). The final result, however, is remains a net positive— a profound example of how we filter our own experiences through the characters and stories we love.

The other piece of that— what helps make The People’s Joker a prime example of underground, guerrilla-style filmmaking— is the animation that surrounds the film’s handful of live-action performers (shot against a green screen over a couple of days). For an indie first feature to have almost every shot be a visual effects shot sounds a little insane, and yet, Drew and her team sourced a large crew of artists and animators to work on the film, all possessing expansive and varied skill sets. The colliding aesthetics will likely alienate viewers with a predilection for clean and uniform visuals. Characters and environments throughout the film are rendered with a chaotic mixture of art styles, from a sketchy 2D cartoon of Joker and Mr. J engaging in a post-coital heart-to-heart, to the 3D character models that engage with the live-action characters. As someone who studied animation in college, it immediately struck me as having student animator energy, but I don’t mean to say that any piece of it is amateurish. Rather, the filmmaking has bottled the spirit of a bunch of eager artists thrown together in a group setting, all from wildly different disciplines and backgrounds, but with a shared creative vision. The free-wheeling nature of the work leaves room for experimentation as well as happy accidents that enhance the material that’s already there. In one scene, when a CGI Lorne Michaels is hurled through space, a broken rig resulted in his clothes being ripped from his body, a detail left in the film that makes the scene that much funnier. Furthermore, much like the content of the film, it’s pushback against the blockbuster superhero movie machine, where underpaid and overworked visual effects artists churn out dull, monochrome environments and CGI characters whose believability doesn’t stand up against their real-life counterparts.

Okay, perhaps that latter statement is a little mean, and it isn’t intended as a blanket to cover every comic book movie ever. Still, the different energies between the majority of what most major studios are producing now (almost every superhero sequel feels like it’s gasping for its last breath, struggling to get through the bare minimum to give fans a little something to chew on) and The People’s Joker (which zips by on its political ferocity and anarchic energy, leaving room to spare for thoughtful tenderness) is stark. That, beyond everything else, The People’s Joker is a trans parody, made about and for queer people, makes its existence all the more righteous. An unfortunate consequence of fandoms is that so many of them have been co-opted by predominately straight white males who can’t stomach the inclusion of any other identities. Todd Phillips’ Joker seemed to bring out the worst of them (speaking not as a queer person, but as someone whose only review in the nearly 15 years I’ve been writing about movies to bring on death threats was about Joker). So to have not only DC characters, but Joker in particular, reimagined for a trans coming out story feels like an especially momentous reclamation of comic book canon for groups who aren’t typically considered their target audience. The People’s Joker may not be as revolutionary as all the accolades seem to indicate. But it’s mere existence— from potentially never seeing the light of day to festival darling to screening in theaters everywhere— feels like a radical act of resistance. And that’s something to celebrate— and enjoy.   

The People’s Joker is now playing in select theaters nationwide. It screens locally at the Webster University Film Series April 18-21, and the Arkadin Cinema and Bar April 26-28. Runtime: 92 minutes.