The People’s Joker hearkens back to the gonzo WTF shit you used to watch in those Early Internet Days of the 90s on Cartoon Network after your bedtime when they let people do whatever they wanted with action figures and shoddy animation at basement level budgets, but it’s also kind of an achievement of the highest order to have infringed on some of the most valuable intellectual property in the history of the world and not be sued into oblivion for it. Vera Drew’s semi-autobiographical story of joining SNL and then exiting the show and developing as a comedian and discovering her trans identity is shimmering with protean camp energy.
I first read about this movie as an underground success at TIFF in 2022 from Sam Adams. At the time, Adams’s glowing review was tempered with assurances that on account of looming lawsuits, it was likely the film would never reach the light of day, but lo and behold its summer release nearly two years after its festival debut and entrance onto Variety’s list of the most overlooked movies of the year–alongside some of my favorite movies of the year, some that left me scratching my head, and some that were really just meh. (The sheer chaos of this list prompted me to try to finish out the whole thing with my five days remaining before the end of vacation.)
The art style for this film is a pastiche of shoddy AI, animation, action figures, and live action which looks offensive at first but then starts to form a cohesive aesthetic the longer it holds up. The music is amazing, both the pieces sampled from pop culture and the ones clearly written for Vera Drew’s queer “supersane” punk aesthetic. The references to DC steep the whole autobiography in straight-faced surrealism. I wish I could’ve seen the film in its high stakes festival single-screening, because the stunt of making a film that would so thoroughly offend some powerful voices in comedy makes it kairotic, like the energy on this film has a radioactive half life as time passes from its initial screening. Which is not a knock on the movie, just an observation about the way that a film featuring Kamala Harris running for VP as Two-Face under Batman functions post 2024 election.
The People’s Joker fits really nicely into the theme of gay camp that some (notably horror) films this year featured, but it’s also a love letter to the Joker of the DC comics and all the villains from Arkham for that matter. Vera Drew is loving in her treatment of the source material, precise and pointed in her critiques while also finding ways to freshen up what’s otherwise the stale reboots and multiversal jelly-on-the-wall of Phases 1-4.
