by Nick Taylor
That’s right folks: It’s time. The review you’ve all been waiting for. It’s me, talking about The People’s Joker, one of the year’s best films. You’ve had over a week now to see this magnificence in your own homes, to treasure its weird earnestness barely submerged amidst so much scuzzy kitsch, to marvel at such ingenuity despite palpably limited assets, to bemoan the lack of international release or festival screenings even though this would kill at a queer film festival. My two trips to see this in a packed theater, flanked on all sides by queers who were so ready for the madness Vera Drew promised them, rank among the best crowd experiences I’ve ever had, and it’s a genuine bummer more people won’t get to experience The People’s Joker in that environment.
It’s not the release this film deserves, but being even this accessible to a wide audience is what it needs. For those wondering what The People’s Joker is, or need an extra push to check it out, follow me below the cut and learn all about it . . . .
A quick recap on the production history and legal kerfuffles surrounding The People’s Joker, for those not in the know: Vera Drew’s film is a queer autobiographical coming-of-age parody. As the title indicates, this is mainly riffing on that guy known as The Joker, with about eight decades of DC Comics characters, film adaptations, and individual comic panels mixed in, topped with some stock footage and sound effects for good measure. The project originated in response to Todd Phillips bemoaning the death of comedy from “the woke left” while on the press junket for 2019’s Joker, and Drew was commissioned by co-writer Bri LeRose to re-edit Joker for some elaborate gag. But as with the best art, Drew’s spiteful commitment to the bit prompted her to consider how the characters genuinely shaped and reflected her life. She crowdsourced collaborations with over 100 artists to create set pieces, backdrops, and character animations. A majority of production took place from 2019-2021, during COVID lockdowns.
Some of you may have first heard of the film when it premiered at TIFF in 2022, where it got great reviews and was immediately slapped with nine thousand lawsuits by Warner Bros. Discovery for copyright infringement. Drew’s next year and a half were primarily devoted to legal battles surrounding fair use copyright law and the definition of the word “parody”, which strikes me as nothing but a major corporation needlessly throwing its weight around to attack an artist who should have been legally protected from this mess. The fact that The People’s Joker got released at all feels miraculous. A plot thread about how all forms of comedy not practiced by a state-sanctioned entity have been outlawed reads as bizarrely prophetic. Given these circumstances, I was always going to be sympathetic towards the film. I was already anticipating it to be up my cinematic alley, but I was not prepared for how much I loved it.
This seems like the right time to get into the film proper, yeah? The People’s Joker follows our hero (Griffin Kramer as a child and Vera Drew as an adult) reflecting on her life from the all-seeing auspices of the fifth dimension. We start with “his” unhappy childhood in Smallville, Kansas, raised alone by an unnamed mother (Lynn Downey). She’s the kind of woman who frightfully blurs the line between protective and oppressive. Mom freaks out when her kid asks if they were born in the wrong body, so she drives them straight to Arkham to get “him” a refillable prescription for Smylex, a drug that gives the user a hideous rictus grin and numbs them to their psychological problems.
Eventually our hero (who I will now be referring to as Vera) leaves home for Gotham City to become a stand-up comedian and audition for the weekly sketch show UCB Live!, because comedy is the best career avenue for sad fucks who hate themselves and don’t want to do anything about it. Tragically, Vera is disillusioned by UCB’s pyramid scheme-y structure, and is confronted by her crushing lack of talent during her first class. She does, however, make a friend in The Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), and the two decide to open an anti-comedy club in Gotham’s Amusement Mile. Vera’s experiments with her comedy routine lead to experiments with her gender identity, leading to her embracing the name Joker at the same time she embraces herself as a trans woman.
Drew cribs her coming-of-age tropes as gleefully and purposefully as she does her DC iconography. Yet for all the madcap, purposefully crude pastiche, I would never call the tone of The People’s Joker disrespectful of its own material. Her mixed-media rewrites of Batman mythology speak to a thoughtful relationship with the material she’s pilfering - clearly doting and immersed in deep, tedious lore even as she warps it like play-doh to fit her thematic allegories and comedic targets. Drew has stated in interviews how she wanted to really play with the idea of comic books as a kind of modern mythmaking, and her interpretations more than validate that ambition. Part of mythmaking is balancing an understanding of what these figures represent even as they’re recontextualized for different stories. Turning the Joker into the center of a queer coming-of-age narrative about a trans woman running an anti-comedy club is a fantastic way to imagine the societal upheaval this character usually partakes in.
Nor would I call her grab-bag of references indiscriminate. It’s a lot, but on a moment-to-moment basis Drew’s callbacks feel pretty specific. Visual references to different mediums and aesthetic styles abound, and the total refusal to make any of this cohere into a more traditional strategy winds up giving it a distinct identity all its own. There’s plenty of Joker in its bones by design, from plot arc to imagery to a euphoric dance down a flight of stairs, but Drew’s tone, pacing, and soundtracking keep The People’s Joker from only being a parody powered by queer petulance. Drew’s skill at imbuing her deeply online leftist queer humor with a core of genuine emotion is disarmingly effective. Her transformation into the Joker matters. The sincere investment in her relationships with her mom and her comedy friends and her first love (Kane Distler) pushes The People’s Joker to be as deep as it is funny, and it is very fucking funny. We can talk about whether the SNL parody is as specific as the other plotlines in the script (it’s not), but it’s worth it for the Herman Goring joke. Meanwhile, the eviscerations of pacifying TV slop, comedians, manipulative queers, it’s all beautiful and perfect. The RuPaul joke? Priceless.
Not since 2013’s Valencia: The Movie/S has a film so explicitly registered as a cinematic zine. Drew’s sensibilities unmistakably give The People’s Joker its shape and rhythm, but practically every artist involved gets to make their mark. It’s like zooming into a thumbprint and finding out it’s actually composed of an infinite set of thumbprints, each as distinct on their own as they are collectively. The VFX team in particular is an example of this spirit. How else would you get so many wonderfully CGI backgrounds, all blatantly and crudely green-screened but still packed with personality? The many characters like Batman or Poison Ivy who only exist as 2-D or 3-D figures even when their scene partners are live-action? Or the full-on animated sequences for fight scenes no one has the budget for, including a daring jump into a vat of estrogen enacted by action figures?
There’s also the makeup work, credited online to Jake Bennett’s prosthetic effects, which devises some clever strategies for the ensemble and does some pretty heroic work to dramatize the Joker’s transition. The ensemble totally meets Drew’s wavelength of crudely comedic sincerity, with Faustyn’s grounded allyship and Downey’s increasingly layered caricature standing out as real achievements. Drew’s own performance is pretty impressive at foregrounding emotional honesty amidst different registers of provocation and candor. It’s one of many miracles in a film whose narrative is still mostly about the miracle that it’s finally been released onto the world. I lead with that very narrative, and as true as that is, I’d argue the real miracle is how fucking spectacular The People’s Joker is. It’s the proud grotesquery and disarming heart of a John Waters film, made in the age of green screens and Minecraft simulators. It’s 90+ minutes of pure cinema founded and executed on the very trans notions of creation and intervention towards bodies, genres, and identities. As an anarchic romp, a personalized spin on calcified character types, and the best of so many proudly queer flicks released this summer, you can’t beat this fucking clown.
The People’s Joker is currently available to rent or buy on most major streaming platforms. It can also be purchased for DVD, BluRay, and VHS.
