The People's Joker

The feature debut of transgender creator, writer, editor, director, and actress Vera Drew is a sharp satire of comic book superheroes, the comedy world, and contemporary culture in general. With its Queer sensibility and DIY avant-garde exploration of personal identity, fashion, and toxic relationships through a specific genre, it plays like a Millennial Liquid Sky (and I mean that as a compliment). In place of the nihilistic, new wave, bisexual, sci-fi preoccupations of the 1982 cult classic, Drew's fair-use sample-culture remix of personal origin story, corporate-owned mythology, and the current zeitgeist is a surprisingly optimistic mash-up of modern notions about gender, sexuality, creativity, and career direction filtered through the genre that's been force-fed to an entire generation for the last twenty years.

Appropriating the DC universe—cease and desist letters from Warner Bros. be damned—Drew paints herself as Joker the Harlequin, a young trans woman from Smallville who escapes to Gotham City to break into the world of stand-up and improv. When she discovers that the comedy world is a racket reliant on narrow conformance and obedience to decades-old concepts, she teams up with another struggling comedian, Oswald Cobblepot, AKA The Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), to create their own underground comedy troupe, which they brand as "anti-comedy." This handy moniker kills two birds since unapproved humor is illegal in Gotham City, and Joker, Penguin, and the other outlaw wannabe comedians who join their group are, let's be honest, empirically unfunny.

When Joker becomes romantically involved with another transgender comedian who dresses as a Joker, Jason "Mr. J" Todd (Kane Distler), who recently left an abusive relationship with Gotham City's biggest sell-out superhero, she's able to fully find her identity but also becomes trapped in an emotionally manipulative relationship with a gaslighting narcist. The way the film depicts its protagonist's formative relationships with her mother and her first lover is on-point, never shying away from the pain and confusion both people caused yet never wallowing in self-pity.

The solid narrative about this character's journey of self-actualization is both off-set and complimented by the picture's erratic, crowd-sourced mise-en-scène—a hodge-podge of green screen live action, various types of animation, direct-to-camera narration, and prosumer CGI visual effects work. This style and approach to cinematic storytelling can be excruciating and exhausting when not enough attention is paid to the underlying narrative, but in this case, the look and vibe of the movie are exhilarating. Unlike so many amateur and indie filmmakers who apply this approach, Drew knows not to overstay her welcome (even a film of just over 90 minutes like this one runs the risk of tiring out the viewer and turning us against it), and she's able to earn genuine laughs in a myriad of ways.

Most vitally, the film's tone is consistently upbeat while never avoiding its difficult themes. It's personal without feeling self-indulgent, honestly self-critical without resorting to lame self-deprecating humor, unsparing in its attacks on the evils it points out while never setting them up as strawmen or simplistic scapegoats, and joyfully anarchistic yet ultimately centering on a story that's about coming together as an individual rather than tearing everything else apart to feel better. I'm not sure I'm down for an onslaught of future Vera Drew films if made in this same style, but I certainly appreciated this one.