By Thomas M. Puhr.
This is the kind of movie that begs to be experienced in a packed theater, preferably with the smell of marijuana wafting down the aisles. It may very well be this century’s answer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Although only two years have passed since its troubled premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Vera Drew’s comic book parody-cum trans coming-of-age tale The People’s Joker (2022) has already amassed an impressive cult following. When I arrived at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre a comfortable hour before a recent screening, a substantial line had already formed outside. Many waiting for the doors to open were dressed as various iterations of the titular DC character. I spotted the messy, white-caked makeup of Heath Ledger from The Dark Knight; the slicked-back green hair of Jared Leto from Suicide Squad; and creative permutations of everything in between. In retrospect, this hodgepodge of influences and styles among the attendees was a perfect primer for a film that repurposes decades of IP to create something that’s by turns exciting and overwhelming, hilarious and earnest. It’s a true Frankenstein’s monster of a movie: a copyright lawyer’s worst nightmare, but an empowering dream come true for its passionate fanbase.
Drew stars as “Joker the Harlequin,” whom we first see as a deeply unhappy child (played in flashback by Griffin Kramer) growing up in Smallville, USA. After revealing to a distraught mother (Lynn Downey) that he feels more like a girl than a little boy, young Joker is dragged to Arkham Asylum – here reimagined as something of a conversion therapy prison – and prescribed “Smylex,” a drug that does little more than twist the user’s mouth into a warped grin.
Not surprisingly, Joker gets the hell out of Dodge once old enough and flees to Gotham – a fascistic police state wrapped in a Day-Glo package – with dreams of making it big as a comedian. After being rejected by an SNL-like sketch show called UCB, Joker teams up with fellow standup Penguin (a very funny Nathan Faustyn) to start an underground comedy club and take down the establishment. Along the way, our hero falls in love with a trans man named Mr. J (Kane Distler) from the club, transitions to being a woman (by jumping into a vat of industrial waste, no less), and comes to terms with a traumatic childhood by embracing her new identity – all while duking it out with her eternal enemy, the Caped Crusader himself.
Dovetailing with this jam-packed narrative is an equally frenetic visual approach that interweaves green-screen effects, ’90s-style computer graphics, Saturday morning cartoon animation, stop motion, and I’m sure many others my late-night brain wasn’t agile enough to notice (Drew is a big fan of rapid-fire sight gags and captions that are almost impossible to perceive without a pause button handy). It would be so easy – and lazy, frankly – to slap descriptors like “chintzy” or “shabby” on a DIY aesthetic that is often quite sophisticated; consider the care with which Drew and her animators recreate the styles of beloved cartoons as far-ranging as Home Movies and Batman: The Animated Series. The old-school computer graphics are equally arresting, the characters’ jerky movements and blob bodies assuming an uncanny, alien beauty on the big screen. Most memorable is Drew’s spoof of Lorne Michaels (clearly, she has a bone to pick with SNL’s halfhearted gestures toward diversification) as a blubbering, whining fool who strips naked and runs berserk at the thought of an openly trans comedian appearing on his show. His avatar looks like The Sims on a bad acid trip.
The old-school computer graphics are equally arresting, the characters’ jerky movements and blob bodies assuming an uncanny, alien beauty on the big screen.”
In short, this is a lot of movie, but the thing that keeps it from collapsing under its feverish maximalism is Drew’s sincere interest in her protagonist’s transition. The cowriter and director has spoken about her creative process as an opportunity to come to terms with her trauma, and we can sense this autobiographical thread in moments that are disarming in their emotional vulnerability; there’s nothing funny, for example, about Joker revealing to her mother that she doesn’t have a single happy childhood memory, or wincing when her boyfriend calls her by her deadname. Rather than feeling out of place or minimized by the surrounding humor, such moments only strengthen the film’s impact.
Like any good coming-of-age tale, The People’s Joker both tugs at the heartstrings and elicits cathartic laughter (often in the same scene). And it embodies Drew’s assertion – one she teased out during a post-screening interview at the Music Box – that camp and sincerity are not mutually exclusive. With this ethos in mind, the filmmaker’s opening dedication to both Batman & Robin director Joel Schumacher and her mother makes perfect sense. She doesn’t hide her heart behind a shield of self-hating irony – a quality that separates her work from soulless, banal exercises in comic-book snark (I’m looking at you, Deadpool & Wolverine) – but embraces absurdist humor and pathos in equal measure.
This is the kind of movie that begs to be experienced in a packed theater, preferably with the smell of marijuana wafting down the aisles. It may very well be this century’s answer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Drew seems aware of her film’s destiny; during a parody of Joaquin Phoenix’s stairway scene from Joker, she jumped up on stage and danced alongside her screen counterpart. The crowd went absolutely batshit. I can see adoring fans emulating this performance at midnight showings twenty years from now – dressing up as their favorite characters, gathering onstage, and reveling in a film made by an artist who understands and loves them.
The People’s Joker (from Altered Innocence) will premiere on MUBI SVOD December 6.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.