Inevitably, The People's Joker profoundly touched me in many scenes in how well it crystallized aspects of growing up and existing as a trans woman. Several experiences of mine that I'd never been able to put into words or feel comfortable talking about were right there on the silver screen, as if writer/director/star Vera Drew had plucked them directly from my brain. What also impressed me, though, was how The People's Joker resonated with me in terms of capturing the era I grew up in. This is a movie that won't be for everyone, that's baked into its DNA. But it's totally been hard-wired to strike a chord with folks like myself who grew up in a pop culture landscape dominated by superheroes, government molded by surveillance state legislation, and inescapable corporations, and found escapism through Adult Swim/FilmCow surrealism. In other words, this is for all the lonely neurodivergent folks who turned to endless revisits of Too Many Cooks or The Walrus Song for a respite from capitalism dystopia.
Tapping so precisely into that relevant vein reinforces the endless specificity defining the bedrock of The People's Joker. This is a movie for folks in the here and now as well as a motion picture befuddled at what constitutes the "status quo" of modern existence. Much like fellow standout 2024 motion picture Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World, contains so much rage at the messed up status of our world. That movie used heavy traffic and cum-stained dresses to express its dissatisfaction with existing in modern capitalism. The People's Joker uses an anarchic clown and jokes at the expense of stand-up comedians to convey the same irritation. Different tools, same end result. Life is both a tragedy and a comedy. The People's Joker is here to make you feel a little less alone navigating that existential quagmire.
Every comic book movie protagonist has some sort of "origin story." The one for Vera/Joker the Harlequin (Vera Drew) sees her growing up as a deeply closeted trans woman in Smallville. Once she reaches adulthood, she moves to Gotham City to pursue a dream of becoming a stand-up comedy. Disillusioned with the minimal opportunities for fulfilling comedy in this domain, Joker and pal The Penguin (Nathan Faustyn) start their own underground comedy club. Here, Joker refines her persona and wardrobe while starting up a romance with Mr. J (Kane Distler), a clown who looks a little "damaged". Far be it from me to spoil all the anarchic bedlam that follows from there!
There is no one "proper" way to visually adapt the mythology of Batman. The characters Bill Finger and Bob Kane created back in the late 1930s have been interpreted by artists as varied as Zack Snyder, Joel Schumacher, Paul Dini, and so many others. The People's Joker ingeniously reflects this through its endlessly varied visual style. Everything from hand-drawn animation to action figures to puppets to recreations of the aesthetic of 90s PC games like Doom is used to realize realms and characters from DC Comics mythology. It's all so bursting with imagination and makes for the ultimate cinematic testament to how expansive the world of Batman adaptations is. Who says you can't harken back to the Adam West and Frank Miller interpretations of this character in the same movie? Plus, this endless cavalcade of flourishes makes the proceedings incredibly fun to watch. You just never know what striking imagery or filmmaking techniques will burst onto the screen next. Navigating everyday life is often a deeply unpredictable experience. The People's Joker's visual malleability captures that nicely.
That's the other key thing about The People's Joker: it's riotously entertaining. Queer misbehavior has always made for the best rebellious cinema. Thank goodness The People's Joker (like fellow 2024 new queer cinema classic Love Lies Bleeding) keeps that tradition alive. This is a motion picture that isn't interested in making trans people "palatable" or "digestible" to cis-het folks. This is a feature where a key moment of Joker's gender discovery is set to a rowdy Mimi Zama song that proclaims on the soundtrack "walk like a bitch/but I talk like a faggot/I don't give a fuck if I'm ladylike." Finally, all my angsty nights of listening to loud Lauren Sanderson tunes while prancing around my apartment in flowery dresses have been reflected on-screen! Representation matters folks!
In all seriousness, that scene rippling with attitude and defiance encapsulates the intoxicating subversiveness of The People's Joker. This motion picture is all about brutally dark jokes, violence, and endless mayhem. Random concussions are the name of the game here, not adhering to a traditional three-act narrative structure or other impulses of mainstream cinema. It's the stuff of studio executive nightmares. One can only imagine Target or Warner Bros. executives asking Vera Drew to tone it down so they could still Joker-themed merchandise to transphobic bigots. Being the kind of material that would make David Zaslav white as a ghost also underscore why The People's Joker is so irresistibly fun. Once you dip your toes into a movie radiating this much confidence, it's hard not to immerse yourself in the whirlpool of cinematic chaos.
Best of all, though, The People's Joker does something that I truly love in cinema: alternate between silliness and something emotionally tangible and make both elements work. Some R-rated comedies (especially modern ones) get too caught up in didactic character arcs or overly convoluted plot mechanics to force sentimentality on you. There are better ways of making you realize you care about the silly characters on-screen. Just look at The Muppet Movie, which caps off a movie of "myth" puns, and Mel Brooks cameos with this emotionally stirring speech from Kermit about how "I've got a dream too...and it gets better the more people you share it with." Suddenly, you realize how much you care about these felt beings. Even those Adult Swim and FilmCow videos I mentioned earlier often wouldn't work if there wasn't a grain of relatable human behavior in there that keeps you invested in the escalating mayhem. The short film "OMG BISCOFF SPREAD", for example, uses surreal imagery to represent the experience of being exposed to some delicious new food for the first time. Sometimes, the only proper response to a fresh yummy sensation is to wander off to a beach and softly whisper "it's made out of fucking cookies."
The comedic absurdity of Muppets, Eric Andre Show sketches, or Llamas with Hats shorts is so oddly soothing because, finally, here's some chaos with purpose to it. Here's mayhem and absurdity that isn't out to make the planet uninhabitable, but instead makes you titter. Many FilmCow videos feature outlandish figures engaging in normal chit-chat amidst horrifying circumstances. That weasel and sentient coat are just like me and my friends trying to exist as trans folks in the political Hellscape of Texas! In the case of Kermit and friends, all the lunacy might even cap off with you getting a little choked up. We cannot escape the terrifying unpredictability of life, but pop culture thriving on absurdist humor can give us a mechanism to cope with it.
That's the artistic legacy The People's Joker evokes. In the middle of all the anarchy and jokes about "incels" or problematic celebrities, you get hooked on this universe. Whenever Vera Drew gets openly raw about her life, trauma, identity, it hits with a thousand times more emotional impact than all straightforward dramas from cis-filmmakers about trans folks combined. Something emotionally tangible has been uncovered even in a universe of ridiculous sets and props intentionally designed to eschew reality. Jim Henson and FilmCow would be proud.
Watching The People's Joker, I couldn't believe this movie existed. Not just because of the endless legal issues it faced leading up to its release, but rather that this movie is so unabashedly trans. Delightfully so! I couldn't have imagined this motion picture existing when I was a superhero movie fanatic in my early 20s constantly imagining scenarios where a trans actor would show up in a Marvel film (how did I think I was cis-gendered for so much of my life?!?) Perhaps Laverne Cox would be in Ant-Man! The Tangerine leads could show up in Avengers: Infinity War for a cameo! None of that came true, though. The People's Joker is more than I could have ever hoped for in comic book movie trans rep, not least of all because it's such a deviously entertaining feature. Modeled in the shadow of the 2019 Joker film, The People's Joker harkens back to many classic movies but it's no hollow knock-off. This is an idiosyncratic motion picture so overflowing with bold decisions and wit that it'll put a smile on the face of any moviegoer. In other words, if you thought you'd seen everything a comic book movie could offer, well, "wait'll you get a load of The People's Joker!"
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