The People’s Joker: an ingenuous, anarchic superhero debut from Vera Drew

Anyone who didn’t see Todd Haynes’s still-illicit featurette Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) until after it became the stuff of legend and lawsuits may experience their own equivalent shock-of-the-new from The People’s Joker. This, too, is a reputation forging debut, a life story told using dolls and/or avatars, and an absolute copyright minefield. (It only reached US cinemas in 2024, two years after its Toronto International Film Festival premiere.)

Superstar, punctuated with dramatised scenes starring Barbie dolls, could have been a study in bad taste had it not been enriched by sociological analysis and an undisguised sincerity that rendered it moving. Similarly, Vera Drew’s film – in which she deploys DC Comics characters and settings (Gotham City, Smallville) to tell her own trans coming-out story – has all the makings of a takedown. But it proves nuanced in its dismantling and re-queering of a comic-book world that has latterly been dominated by a straight cis fanboy sensibility. There is even a nod to Superstar itself – and to Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), in which dolls make a brief return – when fledgling stand-up Joker the Harlequin (Drew) embarks on her transition by diving into a tank of oestrogen, encouraged by her lover and fellow comic Mr J (Kane Distler), with both characters temporarily represented by dolls. “Why’d the gay clown dive into a vat of feminising hormones in a chemical storage plant?” Joker asks in her voiceover. The answer? “Because gender health isn’t accessible even in comic-book movies.”

The film’s ingenuousness – which manifests itself in such deliberately on-the-nose touches as having Mr J hold an actual gaslight while gaslighting Joker – feels miraculous given the project’s potentially snarky origins: it was made initially as a riposte to an argument by Todd Phillips, director of Joker (2019), that modern comedy has been imperilled by ‘woke’ culture.

Shot in five days, with several years of postproduction spent on an intricate collage of visual effects, green-screen and a range of animation styles, the film has the texture of a palimpsest. Traces of bygone Batmen, from the queer-coded 1960s TV series to the two late 1990s Batman movies by Joel Schumacher (to whom the film is partly dedicated), peep and poke through. The twitchy, antic surface combines the DIY aesthetic of Abso Lutely Productions (where Drew honed her skills as an editor for the comic duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim) with the magick touch of Kenneth Anger and the media satire of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987).

The effect is often ugly: some shots exhibit that electric fuzz familiar from the periphery of a VR headset, others the rudimentary building-block graphics of pre-vis animated storyboards. These moments are scrapbooked alongside heartfelt performances (especially from Drew, Griffin Kramer as the young Joker and Lynn Downey as her fraught, bewildered mother) and sequences of ecstatic beauty, like the rose-tinted watercolour animation showing Joker mentored by Ra’s al Ghul (David Liebe Hart), or instances of nightmarish inventiveness, such as young Joker’s first encounter with the anti-depressant inhaler Smylex.

The film is hectic but not haphazard, its layers merging revealingly on the level of allusion and autobiography. When young Joker has her trans awakening, just as Drew herself really did, it is while watching Nicole Kidman in Batman Forever (1995), here retitled Legends of the Caped Crusader and the City of Cybermutants and introduced by Batman himself (“Val Kilmer plays me…”). Also on general release in Gotham City is Foreign Man, modelled on the 2006 Borat (Drew edited Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2018 series Who Is America?); its poster bears a quote from Alexander Knox, the reporter played by Robert Wuhl in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). Wuhl himself pops up twice in The People’s Joker, seen each time in vertically framed phone footage culled from Cameo, the website offering paid-for personal video messages from celebrities. Declining to deliver the lines Drew provided for him, because it contravenes the website’s rules, the actor nevertheless gives the project his onscreen stamp of approval, telling the director: “Good for you!” His appearance, then, is a cameo from Cameo: a kind of pun within the existing Batman in-joke of his presence.

Such attention to detail is consistent in every frame. Even costume design and make-up is weaponised: Mr J’s look is modelled on Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad (2016), which means that a trans male actor (Distler) is now ‘passing’ as the cis man lauded for playing trans in Dallas Buyers Club (2013). Touches like that may speak more of the poison-pen letter than the love letter, but the pure, predominant forces in The People’s Joker are vitality and anarchy. That and the kind of bracing psychological messiness more in step with John Waters, Bruce LaBruce or Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) than with the creeping, homogenising onset of ‘queer joy’.

► The People’s Joker is available to stream on Matchbox Cine