The People’s Joker started life as a re-edit of the original Joker movie, then that idea was junked in favour of shooting something that was all new, though leaning heavily on the intellectual property of Batman and his DC adversaries.
So much did it lean, in fact, that it got as far as one screening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a shot across its bows from Warner Bros. got it yanked it from the festival. There were no further screenings, and nor were there any clear explanations from either director/star Vera Drew or from Warners whether a full-blown cease-and-desist letter had been sent, or whether something else had gone on in the background. (A deal? The film is now being seen, after all.)
In a nutshell the story is about a young boy growing up in Smallville who believes he is a female trapped in a male body, goes to Gotham City to try to be a comedian – something that’s illegal unless organised through official channels – attempts to come off the happy drugs he’s been on his whole life (hence the rictus smile) and sexually transitions while falling in love with a fellow trans, Mr J.
Now decked out in the familiar green hair and white make-up, a slash of red for a mouth, Joker the Harlequin, as this trans comedian calls himself – falls in with a familiar group of characters, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Bane and so on, while trying to square his new identity with his mother back at home.
Drew and co-writer Brie LeRose catch that unhinged fizz of the original Joker movie and push it into gonzo excess, chucking bombs at the “self-righteous pop-Marxist” trans community as they go and also taking pops at Warners, Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, as they mix up animation with live action, the comic and the tragic, the musical and the multiverse. Solid ground is hard to find. Just roll around in it.
Beneath it all a fairly maudlin tale of a boy growing up all askew and then hacking about in the big city trying to come to terms with himself, and getting most of the way there.
There is a lot of dicking about going on in this movie, in the Joker space, the Batman space, the DC space and the superhero space, and Drew and co attack their targets with quite a lot of affection and some censure. You can see why Warners and DC might have got twitchy. At one point Batman is labelled a paedophile – just what was Bruce Wayne up to with his ward? – and at another there’s a fairly faithful re-run of that famous sequence where Joker dances down the steps. IP is one of those things companies don’t like to lose control of, no matter how much they might secretly admire what someone else has done with it.
Whatever you think of it, and it won’t be everyone’s cup of gender-non-specific tea, it’s got energy and inventiveness on its side, and Drew holds it together with a garish yet also subtle performance as the guy who just wants to be a hero in his own life.
Around Drew, Nathan Faustyn is particularly good as the gruff Penguin, a fellow comedian – though it must be said that no one in this film is particularly funny – David Liebe Hart mystifying as supposedly the world’s greatest comic, while Lynn Downey sensitively plays Joker the Harlequin’s smalltown mother and Kane Distler is a lively Mr J, Joker the Harlequin’s beau.
There’s no real budget here, and the live-action sequences set against wobbly animated backgrounds are as makeshift as the full-blown animated stuff that occasionally takes over. If you can imagine one of the more colourful TV Batman/Joker outings given a few shots of female hormones and quite a lot of mind-bending hallucinogenics, that’s your movie. Members of the “homosexual leftist dystopia” – to borrow a phrase from one of the movie’s angry white dudes – will love it.
The People’s Joker – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
