The People’s Joker
Directed by Vera Drew
Written by Vera Drew and Bri LeRose
Starring Vera Drew, Kane Distler, Lynn Downey, Nathan Faustyn
Unrated
Runtime: 92 minutes
Premieres at IFC Center, NYC April 5th

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Where were you when Vera Drew announced The People’s Joker? At home, probably. Seeing her mid-pandemic post felt earth-shattering. Like many, endlessly scrolling Twitter was a matter of fact. People are supposed to Create Art During Trying Times, and here Drew was. I saw the writer/director/editor/star and, more importantly, I saw others seeing her. 

The ridiculous promise of a copyright-breaking collaborative trans coming-of-age/coming-of-Joker film felt, at least, like a sentimental, world-uniting event. Bracketing everything, the ruling classes’ Joker (2019) helmed by Todd Philips released pre-pandemic. In November 2019, Philips told Vanity Fair that he pivoted from bro-comedies like The Hangover and Starsky and Hutch to a comic book psychodrama because of “Woke Culture.” In response, queer comedian Bri LeRose was prompted to joke that she’d only watch Joker if Vera Drew made her own edit, a promise that would snowball into Drew and LeRose co-writing a film in which Comedy is both victorious against Wokeness and is also illegal to the public as a corporately-owned utility.

That was four years ago, which was either yesterday or an eternity ago or right now. It’s hard to be sure. There was a website with a form for those who wanted to contribute. All vocationally displaced artists were welcome. I was nearly one of those people, but ended up ghosting the music team over an email that no longer exists bearing a name I would decide the better of. I ceased communication; risks and new connections felt like too much at the time. I was out to myself but not quite out as a self, as one worthy of the smallest successes.

There is Coming Out, the formulaic announcement of one’s nonnormative identity, and then there is the interminable process of coming out, of stating and restating and tweaking said identity. Joker declares herself to be “Joker the Harlequin” before she understands herself as she and before completing her requisite Joker Training with R’as Al Ghul (David Liebe Hart). The People’s Joker had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival before languishing in copyright purgatory for eighteen months. Finally, for April Fool’s Month, distributor Altered Innocence is giving us a public coming-out ceremony. 

Staggered local transnational releases at festivals, at mass cinemas, or on digital mean that “new” films are rarely mint condition; in this case, The People’s Joker is the rule rather than the exception. Nonetheless, it feels particularly out of time. It could have flown Altered Innocence’s repertory banner, that of Anus Films. In being a film of the people, The People’s Joker is one recapturing lost time. While most pandemic productions made do with on-set masking—masking the conditions of their production—The People’s Joker is 100% greenscreen. The film does nothing to hide intimacy’s necessary distancing. If Joker and her lover “Mistah J” (Kane Distler) are to share a bed, they must do so as cartoons. It's like I was watching the resurfaced work print for a project that could never have possibly made it to completion. 

Like last month’s T Blockers, The People’s Joker lives in an apocalyptic vision of The Present Moment: some signposts are pandemic-influenced–“Queebso”, the sole broadcast network, hearkens back to the failed and forgotten Quibi–while others simply refract current trans politics through a comic book lens (Joker moves from Smallville to Gotham during the Lex Luthor presidency; later, she dives into a vat of estrogen at Ace Chemicals, seeing as trans healthcare is inaccessible). All of this floats in a cyberpunk soup, Cyber Wars lingering in the past and robot eyes hovering in the present. Everything is “coded” in one way or another, though never indecipherable. Yet, legibility is a dead end. Do you need to get the gig economy when Riddler comes onstage to market a Hookup/Rideshare/Riddle of the Day App? That’s a lot of words, but The People’s Joker works magic by throwing as much as it can at you. 

Really, I can’t wait to mosey to a public screening and see what moments elicit laughter. This is at once a juvenile satire and a dead-serious trans autobiography, dealing with addictions and dysphoria and abuse. Then again, Joker forms her main act by huffing laughing gas while an audience member tells their most tragic story. Isn’t it terrible that you were wronged? Isn’t it funny that someone could wrong you?

There are numerous gags that involve name-dropping famous cancelled comedians—Joker tries to skirt the law by calling her unlicensed comedy show “anti-comedy,” like Woody Allen before he married his daughter. There’s a sense that, as self-serious as comedians can get about their craft, such means are bound for corrupt ends. It’s like what Harvey Dent says, how either you die the People’s Joker (isn’t there enough trans death in the world?) or live long enough to see yourself become Todd Philips. Luckily for us, this issue is moot. The Joker has no such future to speak of, for she did not have a past. One of the more minor injustices done to trans people is the pressure to narrativize our histories linearly, as if there is a coherent pre-transition self. Joker speaks to us as narrator, taking advantage of null time as a blank canvas (or a face sans Joker makeup), aware that this is a film that needs an ending while never giving us a coherent telos. Imagine a shaggy dog story without a punchline. Well, who needs one?  Isn’t it enough to lose oneself in telling a story, alive in the exhilaration that it is yours?