Deep within Gotham City lurks an outsider with a plan. From crusading politicians to misunderstanding parents, no one has understood this outsider. All the outsider has ever wanted was to make people laugh and be loved, but that’s hard to do in a world where the rich Wayne family gets to do whatever they want.
And so, the outsider takes a new identity, one that changes Gotham forever. That identity? The Joker.
If that premise sounds familiar, it’s because it describes the 2019 movie Joker, a dour and shallow R-rated take on Batman’s greatest enemy. It also sounds familiar because variations of that plot appear in most superhero movies, still one of the most dominant genres in popular culture.
But it also describes The People’s Joker, an energetic, low-budget comedy written by Vera Drew and Bri LeRose, and directed by, edited by, and starring Drew as Joker the Harlequin.
The People’s Joker is absolutely a superhero story, one that features familiar DC Comics characters, including classic Batman villains like the Penguin and the Riddler, as well as deep cuts such as Creeper. But The People’s Joker is also a transgressive piece of outsider art and a personal human story, which uses the language of superhero movies to tell a tale of identity and becoming.
Even those who don’t follow the world of superheroes recognize the following scenario: a city in danger, villains on the loose, a call for Batman to save the day. Warner Brothers—the mega-corporation that owns DC Comics and the rights to Batman, the Joker, and myriad other major superheroes—has produced countless comics, TV shows, and movies with that very plot.
But The People’s Joker is not a Warner Brothers production. Rather, it’s an independent film from writer, director, editor, and star Vera Drew, one that tells a very vulnerable story through the lens of superhero media. As much as Drew tried to claim fair use and parody rights to use Warner Brothers’s “intellectual property,” the company prevented the movie’s release, forcing her to withdraw the movie from festival schedules after its first—and, for several years, only—showing at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.
It’s easy to see why Warner Brothers would take umbrage with The People’s Joker. Drew plays fast and loose with the characters, reimagining Clark Kent’s understanding newspaper editor boss into an Alex Jones-type demagogue, making Batman’s rogues’ gallery into a collection of depressed underground comedians, and presenting the Joker’s boyfriend (played by Kane Distler) as a former Robin called Carrie Kelly and then Jason Todd before adopting the moniker Mr. J.
In short, The People’s Joker has no interest in abiding by the restrictions of Warner Brothers. That’s because The People’s Joker isn’t about Batman or the Joker. It’s about Vera Drew’s life and work.
Courtesy of Altered Innocence
From left to right, Nathan Faustyn as The Penguin, Kane Distler as Mr. J, Daniella Baker as Catwoman, and Vera Drew as Joker the Harlequin in "The People's Joker."
Drew uses superhero tropes to reflect on her own childhood, her transition into a woman, her relationship with her mother, and her place in the world of comedy. As Joker the Harlequin, Drew directly addresses the camera and narrates her life, starting from her childhood living as a boy in Smallville, Kansas (Superman’s hometown) with a close-minded mother (Lynn Downey) and an absent father. Driven by her mother’s refusal to acknowledge her gender identity, Joker moves to Gotham City and takes sketch comedy classes, only to fail because she cannot hold to the system’s restrictive ideas about gender.
Instead, Joker and the Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), her fellow dropout, start an underground anti-comedy troupe, consisting of others who do not fit the mainstream style—including Catwoman (Daniella Baker), Poison Ivy (a CG figure voiced by Ruin Carroll), and the Riddler (Trevor Drinkwater). While the group dodges Batman and gains a following, Joker falls in love with Mr. J, a trans man who both sees her for the woman she is and emotionally abuses her. At the same time, Joker tries to connect with her mother, whose half-hearted attempts at recognizing her child only distance them more.
All of this plot occurs alongside in-jokes about sketch comedy institutions Saturday Night Live and the Upright Citizens Brigade (UBC), as well as a plot about cybercriminals and a totalitarian police state. And that’s before the Fifth Dimensional imp Mxyzptlk shows up.
With its non-stop references and an overstuffed plot, The People’s Joker can be an overwhelming experience, especially because of the movie’s visual style. While much of the film consists of either Joker addressing the screen or two characters having a conversation, these grounded moments almost always involve actors in heavy make-up and standing in front of green screen graphics, never a real location.
Drew also mixes various other media into the film. Sometimes, she integrates badly rendered CGI figures to interact with the humans. Other times, she uses traditional hand-drawn animation or even action figures to depict fight scenes. Drew also recreates scenes from movies such as Joker, Suicide Squad, and Batman (1989), reframing them as part of her character’s personal development.
But it’s that very focus on the personal that makes The People’s Joker so easy to follow, despite its maximalist nature. Even as Drew foregrounds the unreal nature of the Batman characters and their adventures, she grounds the emotional stakes of the narrative in understandable and relatable human emotions. At its heart, The People’s Joker is about a woman who wants to be recognized for who she is and has dreams of making people laugh.
The film makes those stakes legible thanks to strong performances throughout. He may look like the obnoxious Joker portrayed by Jared Leto in Suicide Squad, but Distler makes his edgy and manipulative comic three-dimensional. Faustyn steals every scene as the Penguin, the Joker’s loyal, but brutally honest, pal. Drew even gets cameos from luminaries in the independent comedy world, including Maria Bamford voicing Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels, Scott Aukerman and Bob Odenkirk as bad guys Mr. Freeze and Bob the Goon, and D.L. Hart as Ra’s al Ghul, reimagined here as a comedy legend.
Courtesy of Altered Innocence
Vera Drew as Joker the Harlequin and Ember Knight as Mx Mxyzptlk in "The People's Joker."
But the strength of the film comes from Drew herself. She proves herself a vulnerable and captivating screen presence, with a wry humor that easily wins over the audience. In an early scene at the UCB theater, the Joker goes through a computer scanning device to determine her place within the comedy hierarchy. When the computer identifies her penis, Joker responds with annoyance.
“Whoa, what does UCB need to know my penis size for?” she demands.
When the computer describes the member as “five inches, just small enough for external approval,” the Joker relents. “That’s a fair point, I can see why you might need to know that,” she admits with a defeated mumble.
As crazy as the Joker’s world gets, Drew never loses sight of her alter-ego’s humanity or the simple needs that motivate her. There’s a sweetness to her connection to Mr. J and a heartbreaking determination to connect with her mother, all presented with a sense of humor that invites the audience to laugh with her.
Of course, you’ve probably heard about Jokers who want the world to laugh with them. These Clown Princes of Crime, played by Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger, try to break society to prove their twisted perspectives correct.
Vera Drew’s Joker isn’t one of those. She’s a Joker who invites the world into her perspective to see how strange it feels to have something as simple as her identity under such scrutiny. From that humane perspective, the superhero trappings of The People’s Joker are not just references to pop culture or even standard power fantasies. Rather, they’re calls for empathy and acceptance, something we can never hear enough.