The People’s Joker made me cry. 

A festival darling a couple of years ago, this DIY transfemme autofiction bildungsroman took an usually long time to reach general audiences, seeing as it was stuck in legal limbo for a while. You see, Vera Drew chose to tell the story of her life—from her earliest realizations that her body didn’t match her concept of herself, to her first real romance and how that other person’s journey of self-discovery helped her understand herself even further, into a happy, fantasy future—all through the lens of living in a comic book world. After an opening that parodies the framing device of Joker, we see a flashback to our essentially unnamed protagonist as a child (when her deadname is spoken aloud, by her mother for instance, it’s bleeped, except in one scene later where it’s uncensored to great effect). In this world, the little AMAB’s greatest dream is to one day be a cast member on UCB (that is, the United Clown Bureau, rather than the Upright Citizen’s Brigade) Live, a parody of SNL in which men in the cast are credited individually as Jokers or Jokemen, while all of the women are consigned to being credited en masse as “The Harlequins.” 

Notably, in this imagining, that Bruce Wayne is Batman is a well-known fact, and he all but rules Gotham with an iron glove. His drones scour the streets for crime, all comedy other than that of UCB Live has been outlawed, and there are films about him in-universe, one of which is clearly a take on Batman Forever, with one of the lines spoken by Nicole Kidman cracking our protagonist’s egg. When she asks her mother about it on the car ride home after the movie, and whether one could be born into “the wrong body,” her mother takes her straight to Arkham, where the sinister Dr. Crane prescribes a semi-antidepressant called Smylex, which is taken via inhaler and instantly distorts the patient’s face into a rictus grin. After a troubled childhood in which an eternally offscreen father leaves all child-rearing to his wife, and with whom our protagonist has an understandably strained relationship, our protagonist (now played by Vera Drew as an adult) moves to Gotham and attempts to get involved on UCB Live and is accepted into the incubator program only to discover that it’s a for-profit scam. This does enable our protagonist to meet their new best friend, Oswald Cobblepot, at the UCB center, and the two of them decide to set up their own illegal anti-establishment “anti-comedy” club. A whole rogues gallery becomes the (lampshaded) found family of the protagonist, including Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Bane, and the Riddler (who gets in early as riddles are, in fact, the antithesis of jokes, making him perfect for their anti-comedy). Our protagonist finds that none of their jokes land, until one day, they see a performance by a Joker named Jason Todd, who’s modeled after the Jared Leto “interpretation” of the character, down to the “damaged” tattoo on his forehead. 

The audience notices before our protagonist does that Jason’s open coat reveals his top surgery scars, so it comes as little surprise to us when he comes out as transgender to our protagonist, although it’s a mild shock to them. Our protagonist asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin, and we see Joker and Jason, whom she calls “Mistah J,” play out, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the complexity of relationships with people who are, whether they tell you at the start with a tattoo on their face or not, damaged. People who are toxic can also be the first people to see us for who we really are, and while that doesn’t cover for the ways in which their behavior is harmful, it does add shades of gray to the fact that these are people who may ultimately teach us something about ourselves. This culminates in our protagonist’s decision to proceed with gender affirming care, presented here as her plummet into a vat of estrogen, Harley Quinn style, only for her and Mr. J to come face to face with the Batman, who has his own abusive backstory with Jason. This is all stuff that is better discovered than recapped, so I won’t summarize further, but this sort of gives you the idea of what this narrative is. Kinda. 

What’s really fun here is just how many different ideas and styles are combined. The segments about J-the-H’s childhood are largely live action, sometimes in locations or sets but sometimes backgrounded only by collages or drawings of her hometown of Smallville. The film-within-a-film mentioned above uses action figures and 3D models to bring not-Batman Forever to life, while some sequences are fully comprised of what appears to be hand-drawn animation. One character exists solely as a puppet, while Poison Ivy is a purely a computer model that looks like she was rendered for a Windows 2000 ROM-based semi-animated point-and-clicker, and characters with more immediate impact on the plot appear in whatever the reimagined memory demands. Some of the film is some combination of several of these, and it’s often so poorly composited that it looks like it’s been cobbled together with excerpts from The Amazing Bulk, but that adds charm rather than taking away from it. I should warn that making the film “busy” in this way might not work for everyone; my viewing companion in particular said that the film’s constant jumps between styles did not mesh with his particular strain of ADHD, and this seems to have made the narrative less legible to him than to me. If you’re able to handle pastiche movies like the kinds put out by Everything is Terrible, you’ll be able to follow this. 

There’s a lot of heart here, especially when it’s clear that Vera is speaking through Joker, like when she admits that when she first arrived in the city she would sometimes call suicide hotlines that would automatically connect her to Kansas because of her area code, and she would use that experience to ground herself by asking how the weather was back home, even if that place had never really been “home.” It’s not all positive, however, as we also feel the biting sting of betrayal when Mr. J calls her by her deadname, the only time that it’s said clearly, in an argument; as she recalls, he had never even known her by that name, so it wasn’t an accident or a slip of the tongue but an intentional use to hurt her. It’s visceral and real, which feels like an odd thing to say about a movie that so provocatively calls attention to its artifice. 

One thing that this one has over the film that it’s parodying/satirizing/reimagining is that it’s actually funny. I’ll admit that I didn’t see the entirety of Todd Phillips’s Joker, but I can promise you that I saw enough. It’s not funny. And hey, not every joke in this one lands, but they come so fast and so furiously across a variety of spectrums that there’s going to be something for everyone here, except for the people who refuse to give the film a chance based purely on their ideologies. The anti-comedy stylings of several of the jokers are funny in their anti-humor with no real knowledge of comics, but there are obviously in-jokes and references, like the omnipresence of the TV-topping mind control device that Jim Carrey’s Riddler’s plan in Forever hinged upon and Catwoman’s complaint that Frank Miller always writes her as a sex worker (not that sex work is bad, she clarifies, but because it’s sexist of him to think that women can’t just be burglars). Most of these are funny even without the context, and some of the jokes that landed most with my theater crowd were oblique jokes about pop culture in general; the biggest laugh of the night came when the yet-unhatched Joker asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin for the first time and their Penguiny friend commenting on their femme attire and pointing out that drag, like comedy, had been outlawed, but only because of the fallout from the explosion at RuPaul’s fracking ranch. 

This is an unusual experience of a film, and I expect that whatever impact it might have been able to have on larger culture has been largely blunted by Warner Bros’ intensive scrutiny and attempts to prevent its release with (unsustainable) claims that it falls outside of fair use, and the overall silence about it (so far at least) from the dipshit side of the cultural divide means that it may not get the popularity bump that everything the right wing pundits complain about does, for better and for worse. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I got something that was unique in its presentation but universal in its examination of the way that (sigh) sometimes, it’s society that’s sick, or it’s our parents who make us sick by their reaction to curiosity and parts of the human experience that are repressed due to societal pressures. It’s an Adult Swim fever dream, and, in its final moments and with its final line, it brought tears to my eyes. You know if this is for you, and if it is, seek it out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond