The ultimate villain of DC Comics, the Joker, has been brought to screen many times. From Cesar Romero’s 1960s camp prankster in Batman: The Movie (1966), to Jack Nicholson’s villain-with-flare in Tim Burton’s iconic Batman (1989) and Heath Ledger’s wonderfully textured psychotic criminal in The Dark Knight (2008).
Though he’s never the hero, the “crown prince of crime” usually dominates whatever film he’s in.
Other versions of the character have been less well received. Critics disliked Jared Leto’s take in Suicide Squad (2016), calling the film “shallow”, and many fans loathed his gang-style tattoos and makeup.
Joaquin Phoenix’s downtrodden schizophrenic Arthur Fleck in Joker (2019) was initially championed by audiences and critics. But the film felt disconnected from Joker’s history and more like a critique of poverty and social isolation than a comic book movie.
Phoenix’s reappearance in sequel Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) was widely panned, due to an incoherent plot and unusual choice of the jukebox musical genre.
This is the landscape that welcomes The People’s Joker, a parody film with an LGBTQ+ twist. Written by Vera Drew and Bri LeRose, and directed by and starring Drew in the lead role, it has just started a screening tour of the UK.
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Set in an alternate (unaffiliated and unofficial) DC universe, this semi-autobiographical dark comedy explores Drew’s real-life gender transition, using a fictional alter-ego, “Joker the Harlequin”. This character is used as a metaphor for the difficulties of transgender adolescence.
The film is a re-imagining of Drew’s coming of age story. She moves to Gotham City, trying to launch a comedy act in a place where comedy has been outlawed. After a poor audition, she decides to create “anti comedy”, supported by a slew of recognisable Batman villains such as the Riddler, Mr Freeze and Poison Ivy.
Alternate versions of famous characters
As the film conjures provocative versions of familiar characters – both similar and radically different to previous incarnations seen on screen – The People’s Joker is well timed to compete with changes to the official cinematic superhero universes made by Marvel and DC.
These film universes have leant into multiverse storytelling, with different versions of the same characters (such as Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland’s Spider-Men) leaving their respective universes to team-up or cause havoc.
As such, it seems apt that The People’s Joker name-checks multiple versions of Batman characters, and includes them in the same film.
Drew’s character is a mix of both Harley Quinn and the Joker, while a former comic-book Robin, Jason Todd, becomes a Leto-style Joker. The film uses this opportunity to satirise Leto’s characterisation including the “damaged” forehead tattoo that annoyed fans.
Drew dances to a song called Party Woman, a not-so-subtle reworking of Party Man by Prince, which soundtracked the arrival of Nicholson’s Joker in Batman (1989). The film also satirises Phoenix’s dance on a flight of steps in both of his Joker movies.
Reimagining continuity
The People’s Joker mines Batman comic lore and gleefully stirs it up. Todd announces: “Before I was Jason Todd my name was Carrie Kelley” (a young, female iteration of Robin who appeared in Frank Miller’s landmark graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns).
Old speculation around the nature of Batman and Robin’s relationship is also referenced when Todd notes that after he transitioned, Batman made a pass at him.
These name-checks and motifs are cleverly used and a perfect fit for their new context. Smylex (the Joker’s rictus grin inflicting poison) becomes a teen medication riffing on Ritalin, and metaphor for the repression of identity. This ironically also leads Drew to discover that she can use Smylex-induced humour to deflect attention from her secret identity and transition.
A film starring two different versions of the Joker has a surprising precedent. DC Comics has run a storyline since 2016 that suggested Batman had actually come up against three different Jokers. All three then teamed up in a 2020 mini-series.
This goes hand in hand with Joker: Folie à Deux, and the Gotham TV series which both suggest a new Joker will arrive when a previous one dies.
The People’s Joker matches its anarchic content with stylistic surrealism: blurred backgrounds, extensive use of green screen, bargain basement makeup, periodic slips into animation or action figures, and CGI effects to create the rictus grins. These all give the film a hallucinogenic feel, culminating in an ending where Drew sails through the sky with fifth-dimensional imp Mister Mxyzptlk, floating between an infinite number of possible timelines.
With various superhero franchises leaning into different media, continuities and multiverses, The People’s Joker follows in the tradition of previous re-imagingings of Batman.
As many authorised comic book films are starting to feel like they’re retreading too familiar ground, hopefully the critical appreciation of this film will point towards stranger and more unique comic adaptations yet to come.
The post “The People’s Joker remixes familiar characters to create a new kind of comic book movie” by Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton was published on 03/04/2025 by theconversation.com