There is no way any of us should have seen Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. The film uses a dozen trademarked character names from DC Comics, changing nary a one to obfuscate its identity, expressly without the permission of trademark owner Warner Brothers. Not only that, it casts any number of them as gay or trans, with the big guy, Batman himself, portrayed as a closeted homosexual who grooms minors. Warner Brothers did indeed try to stop the release of this movie, which was only in a few cinemas at special times in the U.S., and only because The People’s Joker squeaked by legally under the rules of fair use and parody, the details of which are outside the scope of this review. Then again, with this subject matter, it was never going to play on 2,000 screens anyway.

It’s not that Drew, who is also the star of this film, actually believes any of these characters are gay or trans, canonically. They’re really stand-ins for people in her own life. This is her origin story as a trans filmmaker through the prism of the popular entertainment she grew up consuming, and it doesn’t get more iconic than Batman and his adversaries. (It’s similar, thematically and even in execution, to what Jane Schoenbrun did with I Saw the TV Glow.) It’s like you wouldn’t need any special permission to hold a themed costume night at a local drag bar, but then you would if you showed it to millions of people.

Of course, being likened to a drag queen is not an ideal outcome for Drew as we learn in this confessional, exhilarating film. The People’s Joker addresses the ways we talk about trans identities and fail to talk about them correctly, but it’s not didactic about this. In fact, one of the supreme joys of the film is how funny it is, appropriate for a film about a failed stand-up comedian who becomes a Gotham City menace. At least, that’s who the Joker is, canonically. Here, she’s more of a gadfly and media personality whose anti-comedy routine threatens to expose Gotham’s greatest for who they really are.

The film walks the line between an actual fantasy within a comic book universe and a documentary in which Vera Drew is addressing us directly and crediting us with the understanding that it’s all metaphor. She shows us scenes from her youth when she was called ______, and we’re blocking out her dead name here, because it’s bleeped out (almost) any time it is spoken in the film. She portrays herself as a young boy growing up in the heartland town Smallville, familiar to DC fans as the hometown of Superman, and how she longed to go to Gotham City and explore the feelings of being different that her mum (Lynn Downey) never understood. What we see of Gotham and the larger universe is wild and woolly, with Bruce Wayne existing as the megalomaniac owner of a company that makes drones; a drug called Smylex that men are supposed to give to their sad wives so they can enjoy playing golf more; all media owned and run by a company that specialises in grotesque reality shows, and has outlawed the performance of comedy; and references to such things as “President Lex Luthor.”

When the boy finally moves to Gotham City and starts considering himself a girl who goes by Joker the Harlequin, combining canonical traits of both the Joker and Harley Quinn, she meets Oswald Cobblepot, otherwise known as Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), who also wants to be a comedian despite this pursuit being outlawed. Determining that comedy can be anything, even things that are purposefully unfunny (which Joker seems to excel at), Penguin suggests they rent a warehouse and create an anti-comedy routine, because then the government can’t touch them. They recruit other familiar villains, such as a non-gendered Poison Ivy (voice of Ruin Carroll) and a Riddler who goes by the SEO-optimised name RIDLR (Trevor Drinkwater). They’re all trying to catch the attention of the only authorised comedy gig in town, a Saturday Night Live-style show called United Clown Bureau, run by a person named Lorne Michaels (a GTA-style video game character voiced by Maria Bamford) and hosted by Ra’s al Ghul (David Liebe Hart). (Yes, that makes this the second 2024 film to feature Lorne Michaels as a character.)

Easing Joker’s transition is the first person to see her for who she really is, another aspiring comic called Mr. J (Kane Distler), a trans man who presents as a combination of Robin successor Jason Todd and the Jared Leto version of Joker from Suicide Squad. While Joker’s first romantic relationship is just what she needs to blossom, she soon learns it’s an abusive one, and Mr. J is hung up on the way Batman used and abused him. Meanwhile, there’s the everpresent threat that their increasingly unhinged antics – all propped up by the artificial smiles and laughter of Joker’s regular hits of Smylex – will get them crushed by Lorne Michaels or Batman or both.

It’s easy to see why Warner Brothers didn’t want this film to see the light of day. However, the less knee-jerk reactionary people in the company should have recognised that using their characters to support an obviously very personal coming out journey casts their intellectual property in a positive light, even as it deconstructs all the traits of that IP they would be trying to protect. And it’s hard to know how any of them could have watched it without being touched by this DIY labour of love, which was shot not on traditional sets but in isolated locations during COVID. Most of what surrounds the actors on screen are drawings and obviously fake backgrounds, which allow for considerable creative energy that further divorces this from anything “real,” from any suggestion that this is somehow a WB-approved direction to explore these characters.

Drew never sacrifices her sense of how fun this should be in the pursuit of her ultimately earnest goals. The character creations are great here. She herself is self-deprecating and exasperated while always wanting to extend one more chance to the obstinate people in her life. Mr. J is charismatic and enthusiastic, even as his traits end up domineering. Of particular comic gold is Nathan Faustyn’s Penguin, simultaneously cheery and acerbic, whose instinctively accepting personality embodies the “yes and” ideals of improv comedy that get shouted out here. Adversaries like Batman are cartoonish and removed, appearing only on screen as secondary characters whose subjectivity is shielded from us, perhaps further insulating this movie from the Warner Brothers legal apparatus, but also serving a clear narrative function: This is a movie about those that society has always seen as the villains.

It’s notable that The People’s Joker, which was first screened in 2022, finally got released in the same year as Joker: Folie a Deux, which also imagines itself as sticking a thumb in the eye of the mainstream comic book universe. The People’s Joker shows us how that’s really done. And though it’s unlikely that any future filmmakers will want to follow Drew’s treacherous legal path, the film showcases the ecstatic truth that can arise from using familiar storylines and characters to illustrate extremely personal stories. After all, aren’t we all really the owners of these characters? Drew has used them to show us who she truly is, and we could not be more grateful for that.

 

The People’s Joker is currently playing in very select cinemas, such as Cinema Nova.