Written by Alyx Vincent
Vera Drew has given us the Joker we need, and the Joker we deserve.
As director, writer, editor and star, the Emmy-nominated Drew, here in her debut feature film, has created lighting-in-a-bottle, once-in-a-generation cinema with The People’s Joker.
Opening in theaters with a Friday, April 5 bow at the IFC Center in New York City before expanding to more screens across North America in the coming weeks, The People’s Joker is a scrappy, stunning and fair use DIY vision of Gotham City the likes of which we’ve never seen. When a film’s opening dedication is “to mom and Joel Schumacher,” you know you’re in for a wild ride.
Drew – a veteran of the Tim & Eric comedy universe – stars as a Smallville-raised, Gotham Ciy-based transgender woman and aspiring comedian who, dejected in her attempts to break into the city’s government-sanctioned sketch comedy scene, gathers together a rogue’s gallery of fellow underground performers to unleash on Gotham something that legally can’t be considered comedy – it’s anti-comedy.
Giving away any more of the plot would spoil the wicked wonders Drew and company get up to here. The People’s Joker is a marvel to behold, at once a raw queer coming-of-age epic, a savagely smart satire of the corporate comedy landscape and a mesmerizing mixed media vision of a Gotham City that feels unprecedented yet faintly familiar in a phantasmagorical sort of way.
This is renegade punk rock cinema at its purest. It has the anarchic chosen family chaos of John Waters, the treasured trashy agitprop spirit of Lloyd Kaufman and the bleeding heart-on-sleeve vulnerability of John Cameron Mitchell.
Drew masterfully marries her medium and her message, as The People’s Joker feels like as much of an act of rebellion in its content as in its construction – and to see why, we must engage in one of the most tiresome of Internet pastimes – Joker (2019) discourse.
Todd Phillips’ Scorsese-cribbing self-so-serious Oscar-winning slog, with its aesthetic references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its half-hearted acknowledgements of the general concept of class conflict, pretended to be the bold statement that The People’s Joker actually is. Drew has made a movie with plenty of meat on its proverbial bones – this is art that matters.
As transgender people increasingly find their existences marginalized and threatened across the country, one can’t help but feel like the cultural zeitgeist has sent up a Bat Signal of sorts for someone to speak to this perilous moment, and Drew has ably answered the call.
After all, when the status quo is so oppressive, Drew’s film seems to argue, some people can be pushed only so far before they start to push back. This isn’t a Joker watching the world burn for the sake of the flames – this feels like the first spark of a revolution.
