In an early scene from the best Joker movie of 2024, the camera pans across Gotham City in ruins. Despite the protesters rioting outside, one person seems completely calm. Waiting in a studio green room, the Joker prepares to go onto live television and shock the society in which we all live. Of course this Joker isn’t going to shoot Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro doing his best Johnny Carson impression). Nor is he going to flashback to shooting Murray Franklin while on trial for murder. No, this is Joker the Harlequin, who disrupts the totalitarian state that Bruce Wayne enforces on Gotham through constant surveillance drones just by being a trans woman.
Portrayed by director and co-writer Vera Drew, Joker the Harlequin is the protagonist of The People’s Joker. Where Joker: Folie à Deux and its 2019 predecessor confuse cynicism for profundity, making vague observations about the legal system and mental health in pursuit of unpleasantness disguised as a point, The People’s Joker is actually transgressive. And funny. And humane. Shot in 2022 but shelved for two years because of its unapologetic use of DC Comics intellectual property, The People’s Joker plays partly as a one-person show about Drew’s embrace of her gender identity. It also clocks her struggles in the independent comedy scene and difficult relationship with her mother. Yet at the same time, it remains a pseudo-DC superhero movie, complete with deep comic book cuts and Batman movie references galore.
A Joker the Harlequin Is Born
Co-written by Drew and Bri LeRose, The People’s Joker traces Joker the Harlequin’s rise from an ordinary child in Smallville, where she lived with a loving but troubled mother (Lynn Downey) and absent father, to her rise into becoming the most dangerous person in Gotham City. In fact, Joker becomes the world’s greatest villain—mostly by accepting that she’s a trans woman and doing not-very-funny sketch comedy.
Because it officially operates as a parody of DC Comics characters, The People’s Joker plays fast and loose with lore. It takes place in a Gotham City that draws from basically every Batman adaptation in which everyone knows that Batman is Bruce Wayne (voiced by Phil Braun). Batman has retired from crime fighting and instead deploys invasive drones to patrol the city while he embarks on a political career.
And by “crime,” Batman seems mostly concerned with enforcing heterosexual norms via popular culture, thanks to the invasive Queebso Network. That enforcement extends to the comedy world where mentor Ra’s al Ghul (David Liebe Hart) teaches young men how to become Jokers, comedians who quip about the acts they want women to perform, and teaches women how to become Harlequins, sexy ladies who laugh for the men. Although still presenting as male, Joker the Harlequin realizes that she doesn’t fit as a Joker, nor does she particularly want to be just a Harlequin. So she and a fellow dropout of the United Clown Bureau (aka UCB), Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), start their own comedy troupe populated by muscle head Bane (Dan Curry), non-binary Poison Ivy (a cheap CG creation voiced by Ruin Carroll), and others.
Joker also meets and falls for another Joker called Jason Todd (Kane Distler), who forces the heroine to become the Harlequin role to his Mr. J. As Mr. J gets more and more controlling, she finds herself turning again to the Smylex she was prescribed as a child in Smallville. That is until she breaks free and becomes Joker the Harlequin, which threatens all of Batman’s fascistic society just by existing.
An Elseworld Unlike Any Other
Like every other comic book adaptation, The People’s Joker refashions DC Comics lore to its own ends. Unlike something like Folie à Deux, it does so from a place of real love for the characters. The People’s Joker features deep cut after deep cut. Robert Wuhl, who played Alexander Knox in 1989’s Batman, appears via the celebrity influencer platform Cameo. Tim Heidecker voices Superman‘s boss Perry White, reimagined here as an Alex Jones-style truther. The Creeper (Cricket Arrison) hosts a trashy talk show, where trans woman Huntress (Mia Moore Marchant) becomes the first queer person that Joker ever sees.
That doesn’t even count all of the movie and adaptation nods, including spinning logo transitions from the ’60s show, an intentionally crappy CG recreation of Chase Meridian seducing Batman in Batman Forever, and even Joker quoting Joaquin Phoenix‘s character. “I used to think my life was kind of a tragedy,” she tells her psychiatrist, before pausing and declaring, “It is. It’s a tragic life.”
But here’s the thing. The People’s Joker is an actual comedy, so not only is Drew’s delivery of the above line hilarious, it ends with the psychiatrist nodding, offering a bland “that’s good” and writing up a Smylex prescription. Instead of just heaping misery upon its central character, The People’s Joker builds empathy through Drew’s self-depreciating portrayal. Time and again, the movie tells us that her comedy routine is terrible, even as she becomes more popular.
Drew gets cameos from ringers like Maria Bamford (who voices Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels), Scott Aukerman (Mr. Freeze), Bob Odenkirk (Bob the Goon), and the aforementioned Heidecker, but she and her main cast are more than capable of carrying the humor themselves.
Feelings and Folly
At this point, one might argue that it isn’t fair to compare The People’s Joker to Folie à Deux. After all, the latter is an incredibly expensive musical(?) drama while the former is a cheap indie comedy. However, The People’s Joker is more dramatic and upsetting than anything in either of the Joker films, precisely because it’s so personal.
The most shocking moment in The People’s Joker occurs just over midway through the film when Joker’s relationship with Mr. J hits its lowest point. Furious that Batman has landed a GCB Live hosting gig that he wanted, Mr. J pulls out a gun and shoots Joker’s television. When Joker calls him out on his unacceptable behavior, Mr. J hurls insult after insult.
At the fight’s crescendo, he looks at Joker and sneers, “Shut up,” following insult with Joker’s deadname. Mr. J’s attack is the one time in the film that we hear Joker’s deadname. In every other instance, the movie bleeps the deadname like a curse word. But here, the movie lets it fly, so that everyone watching understands the hurt and betrayal Joker experiences. The camera holds on Joker, whose anger and hurt is only highlighted by her makeup, the smeared dark splotches around her eyes and the painted-on smile contrasting with her bleach white face.
The Joker We Need
Joker: Folie à Deux certainly messes with DC lore, with its smarmy Harvey Dent and Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel. It tries for shocking material, most notably the climax of Arthur’s relationship with the prison guards, and even goes for the occasional joke during a musical sequence. But it all comes to naught, achieving only a bland and bloated piece of misery masquerading as intellectualism.
Despite having no budget, despite having limited distribution because of its copyright violations, and despite (or because of!) its heavy use of cheap computer graphics, The People’s Joker feels genuinely transgressive and shocking. But its shocks don’t come from generic provocations. They come from real humanity, the lived experience of someone who translates her suffering through her love of DC lore and her keen sense of humor, resulting a movie that’s real and funny and exhilarating.
In short, The People’s Joker is the best Joker movie of 2024. And I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
The People’s Joker is available to rent or buy on all streaming platforms. Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters now.
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