Writer/director Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is the best superhero origin story you may never get to see. The queer coming-of-age comic book adaptation stars Drew as a trans comedian from Smallville who tries to make it big in Gotham City. It is an unauthorized take on the iconic DC Comics character that features a rogue’s gallery of Batman villains, a trans Robin, the Dark Knight himself and an unexpected villain via a fictionalized version of Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels.
The director is an alt-comedy veteran who was nominated for a Technical Emmy as lead editor on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? and helmed episodes of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s Our Bodies for Adult Swim. She co-wrote the script with Bri LeRose and says her debut feature is a parody that falls under fair use.
“There are new stories we can tell within superhero and horror movies. I think the space is there, and it’s not being taken,” Drew said in an interview with Xtra ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere. “So I’m hoping I can keep taking it.”
But Warner Bros.—which owns the rights to many DC Comics characters, including the Joker—disagrees, and stated so in legal paperwork this week.
All screenings of The People’s Joker at the Toronto International Film Festival were cancelled after its Sept. 13 midnight world premiere at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. The late-night showing, part of the popular Midnight Madness program, attracted an enthusiastic crowd, including cosplayers who were encouraged via Twitter to show up in superhero and supervillain drag. For now, this is the only theatrical audience to have seen the film, whose cancellation due to Warner Bros.’ legal posturing has overshadowed the debut of an outstanding, unparalleled, unabashedly queer comic book romp weeks after the company mothballed its $90 million Latinx-led Batgirl movie.
The film opens with a disclaimer about its unauthorized status, then introduces us to an adult Joker (Drew) awash in a sea of television news and commentary. A flashback shows us a young Joker (played by Griffin Kramer), taken to Arkham Asylum by her mother (Lynn Downey) after expressing discomfort with her body. Their session with Dr. Crane, aka the villain Scarecrow, played by Christian Calloway (not to be confused with TV’s Dr. Frasier Crane), feels like a Dr. Phil segment. The psychiatrist harangues mother and daughter into an unconvincing scripted-for-television resolution, made possible by an inhaler with the fictional drug Smylex that numbs the brain, but does nothing to heal trauma.
The story then shifts to a young adult Joker successfully auditioning for the United Clown Bureau (UCB), a mishmash of sketch-comedy institutions Second City, Saturday Night Live and the Upright Citizens Brigade. There’s not much to the audition process: an automated body scan, including a literal dick pic.
UCB is run by Raʼs al Ghul (David Liebe Hart), Batman’s greatest foe. It is the only legal venue for comedy because comedy has been outlawed in Gotham City by Batman. After flunking her first class, Joker starts an underground anti-comedy club with the Penguin (Nathan Faustyn). The Red Hood (another Batman reference) is home to a who’s who of Batman villains who stink at telling jokes. Among them is Jason Todd, a former Robin who was groomed and abused by Batman. Kane Distle is exquisite in his first movie role, channelling Steve Buscemi while resembling Jared Leto’s Joker. “Mr. J” becomes Joker’s toxic gaslighting transmasc boyfriend. He sometimes helps, but mostly hinders, her on her journey to find herself, save comedy and confront the Dark Knight.
The People’s Joker avoids the extended boss fights that bog down the third act of most superhero movies. Batman’s comeuppance and the demise of that other villain, Lorne Michaels, are short and highly satisfying. The film wraps with a surprising and touching twist that completes Joker’s arc and is sure to delight both comic book lovers and the uninitiated.
Shot in front of a green screen over two days with crowdsourced effects from an army of artists, The People’s Joker is a visual feast that combines traditional and 3D animation, stop motion, puppetry, virtual and miniature sets and just about every cinematic trick ever used. It is a lo-fi kaleidoscope of shifting styles and techniques that recall Speed Racer, the frenetic 2008 Wachowski sisters film based on the popular 1960s manga and cartoon.
Just as in Speed Racer, the visual eclecticism and artificiality of The People’s Joker are jarring at first. But the viewer quickly adjusts to the film’s fractured imagery and logic because Drew’s charismatic performance anchors the story and draws the audience into her universe. The screenplay is smart, emotionally compelling and funny. Joker transitions from a woman who “became a comedian because comedians are shitty people” to asking who she would be “if there were no consequences” before reclaiming comedy by “not living a lie.”
The People’s Joker succeeds at every level. It gleefully satirizes our media-saturated landscape, skewers the entertainment industry, lovingly parodies comic books and delivers a heart-wrenching and heartwarming trans coming-of-age story that ultimately ends in triumph. In many ways, Drew embodies the best tendencies of comic book creators who continuously retool, reinvent, reboot and recontextualize superheroes and supervillains to modernize them and speak to changing social mores. Her Joker, although unauthorized, is a valid and exciting reinterpretation of the character that rivals the best official interpretations.
But how does The People’s Joker fit into decades of comic book and cinematic continuity? It doesn’t, and there again, Drew draws on the time-honoured comic book tradition of “imagined stories” that take place outside established timelines, including what many consider the greatest Superman story ever published. Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s 1986 Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? concluded the Man of Steel’s nearly half-century saga before a complete reboot, but it technically never happened. That same year saw the publication of Frank Miller’s influential The Dark Knight Returns, a dystopian take on a 55-year-old Batman coming out of retirement to fight crime in a Gotham City overrun by mutants, also out of continuity. More recently, at the movies, Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019) and Matt Reeves’s The Batman (2022) were both set outside the continuity of the DC Extended Universe films that started in 2013 with Zac Snyder’s Man of Steel.
Drew reclaims the outsider status and social justice elements of the earliest superhero comics. Superman, the original caped crime fighter, was the brainchild of Jewish creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Their early stories, dating back to 1938, depict the Man of Steel as battling slumlords, corrupt politicians, arms dealers and domestic abusers while doubling as journalist Clark Kent. Like the men who birthed him, Superman is an immigrant (albeit from another planet), an outsider and a small-town boy who campaigns to protect his adopted city from the individuals, the organizations and the institutions that threaten it. The People’s Joker reflects these values, giving them a fresh queer bent, and the result is an inspiring and entertaining film that must be seen, authorized or not.
The day after the midnight screening, the director took to Twitter to explain why the film was pulled from the festival, correcting rumours of a cease-and-desist order and praising TIFF for its support and #FreeThePeoplesJoker trended in Canada as fans of the film tried to get Warner Bros. to step down, and launched an unsuccessful campaign to get it the TIFF People’s Choice Award.
Despite the controversy around rights clearances, The People’s Joker continues its festival run and will next screen at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles on Oct 4. In the post-premiere Q&A, Drew said she might re-edit the film to get around some of the legal issues.
Xtra spoke to Vera Drew via Zoom from her Los Angeles home a week before The People’s Joker premiered at TIFF.
In a 2019 red carpet interview at the Technical Emmys, you said, “I want the good side to take back the offensive in comedy.” How did that inform your approach to The People’s Joker?
Growing up, coming into myself creatively, I always thought of subversive, crude and alternative content as—not specifically liberal—but leftist and more on the progressive side of things. In the last couple of years, the rise of 8chan [an online message board composed of user-created images, now known as 8kun] and memes and all that stuff caught me off guard. I’m seeing all these memes now that five years ago would have been a dumb shitpost from some trans woman on Tumblr, but now they’re from some Nazi kid. It kind of broke my brain, and it still breaks my brain.
The goal of this movie was to make something subversive and call out all the nonsense that’s going on systemically right now, with both trans healthcare and housing and how we gatekeep content. I wanted to take all of those talking points and look at them in a way that was crude. I wrote the script with my friend Bri LeRose, and when I showed it to my friend Amber, her immediate response was, “This is the rudest fucking thing I’ve ever read.” And I felt it was the first signpost on this journey that we were headed in the right direction. I needed to be silly, and I needed to be rude because I’m talking about every hardcore traumatic thing I’ve ever been through.
Can you tell us about the genesis of The People’s Joker? What is the film’s origin story?
I never got commissioned to make art, so this film was technically my first commission. Bri initially gave me $12 to re-edit Todd Phillips’s Joker [with found footage], and I started doing it because the pandemic had just begun. I had been working in alternative comedy as an editor, director and writer for a few years, and the moment everything shut down, it was clear my little pocket of the industry was expendable. Nobody was clamouring at my door. So I had space to do something that was just art for art’s sake. My joke edit of Todd Phillips’s Joker had fart sound effects, whooshes and all the staples people love from my editing career scattered throughout it. But I kept moving toward an emotional centre within this found-footage thing I was putting together.
I had this realization that this is bullshit. We’re constantly fed the idea that superheroes are our modern myths, which is propaganda created by our government to keep making Marvel movies, but there can be some truth to it. We can take these characters and treat them like true myths. I gave myself space to just be okay and told myself, “I’m just going to make a weird thing because I’m broke and scared and alone in this house, and there’s a virus out there, and it’s going to kill everybody I love.”
Did you read comic books growing up?
I read a lot of comics growing up, but my introduction to superheroes was the movies, especially Batman Forever. I think it shaped my aesthetic in general, the neon, the colour and all. That movie is just such an artistic achievement. I love Joel Schumacher. His entire filmography is incredible, and he’s a diverse filmmaker in that none of his movies are that similar. The two Batman movies he made are pretty different, even though everybody lumps them together.
I was obsessed with movies. Growing up, I knew I was a filmmaker before I knew I was a girl. The idea was always there to make movies, specifically genre movies. I love genre, but I don’t like this idea that genre is somehow lowbrow. I don’t even know what genre is anymore, especially in a world where everything is a fucking superhero movie. But I love the archetypes within genre filmmaking, and I think it has a lot of potential to explore and unpack things about our experiences. There are new stories we can tell within superhero and horror movies. I think the space is there, and it’s not being taken. So I’m hoping I can keep taking it.
The film parodies superhero movies, but it also skewers the comedy scene. Can you tell a little about your experiences doing sketch comedy and stand-up?
I’ve been doing comedy most of my life. I came up at Second City and had sketches in the touring company when I was 16, but I couldn’t get a child-acting career going for shit. However, I was a really funny kid, and people wanted to watch me perform, so there was always something there. Early in my life, comedy, and performance, in general, were the only safe spaces I had to play around with my gender expression. I loved doing “drag,” or whatever you want to call it. When I was doing stand-up, I was usually in drag. At the same time, comedy is a space where I’ve seen a lot of exploitation.
I also think irony is extremely dangerous and the root of most problems we have as a society. I don’t think it all stems from irony, but the general attitude of irony that permeates every aspect of culture, particularly American culture, keeps us all locked in this hellscape we’re in. I also have a lot of issues with how governments literally use comedy to influence elections and decide what wars we go into.
Lorne Michaels is one of the main characters in our movie. He’s a villain who gets more screen time than [Batman villain] Scarecrow. I think he’s a primary villain in this movie. There was some nervousness there. Lorne Michaels started Saturday Night Live, one of the most toxic work environments I’ve ever heard of (and I’ve heard of a lot of them working in television). SNL is also a show that decides elections. It’s part of the military-industrial complex, as far as I’m concerned, so somebody like him needs to be deconstructed, especially while he’s alive because, when he goes, it’s going to be like, Mother Teresa died again. (Did she die? I don’t know if she’s dead.)
In the film, Dr. Crane (aka Scarecrow) says, “I give you the gift of victimhood. Without fear, what would you have to hold on to?” That powerful statement is one of the central ideas of the film. Can you tell out how facing and overcoming fear played out in your life as a trans woman and an artist?
In many ways, all I had to cling to my whole life was fear, which can be a great motivator. Despite how scared, nervous and uptight I can be, I’ve had a lot of success. For somebody who swears as much as I do, I have a pretty sick TV career. People like me, and seemingly my stuff, but my success comes from working my ass off because I was terrified. I was terrified of moments of silence. I was terrified of being alone with my thoughts. I was terrified of any human relationship I could have that would subject me to any sort of vulnerability or authenticity.
As I said, all I had to cling to was fear. I had reached a breaking point in my life where I was surrounded by people who didn’t care about me. I wasn’t taking care of myself and was deeply in the closet. I was miserable, and my life was only getting worse. So I asked myself, “Can I hold on to this? Can I make myself more miserable? Can I cling to this anchor of fear? Or can I let go? And who knows, maybe I’ll burst into flames, but at least I won’t be as scared, miserable and confused all the time.”
I try not to make decisions based on that now, and I try to move toward the stuff that scares me, like making this movie, which was terrifying, especially during the first year of working on it. It’s been about two years now, and there were many times when I was thinking, “Really? This is my first movie? It’s an hour and a half, and every single shot is a [visual effects] shot.” I didn’t own the rights to any of the characters, and I was spending money. It was ill advised and a terrifying, horrifying thing to do. Yet, every step of the way, I was trying to move toward that feeling of uncertainty, and what went along with it was a lot of fun.
I now think that when you move toward fear and try to move through it rather than staying locked on what you’re afraid might happen, authenticity is on the other side. Usually, it’s accompanied by love, and often there’s some destruction, too. But love and authenticity typically follow.
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