The People’s Joker – you have to see it to believe it

Few plot synopses strike dread into a cinephile’s heart like “[noun] coming of age story.” The market is oversaturated, plus they’re mostly shit because the writer/director attempting to pour their heart out doesn’t actually have enough insight or distance to make their film good. (And, as always, actual talent is in short supply.)

However, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is a multihyphenate masterpiece that effortlessly satirises specific films, the decline of American empire, media monopolies, the New York standup and sketch comedy scenes, corporate rainbow-washing, and the concept of the bildungsroman itself, while offering novel insight into trans issues, unhappy childhoods, addiction, and emotionally abusive relationships.

This may sound like a giant mess, and yet Drew’s wild narrative about an unfunny standup transitioning, falling in love, and saving the world by appearing on a facsimile of Saturday Night Live never falters. She also has a throwaway gag where, after listing off some Batman villains hanging out at an anti-comedy club, she introduces a character named “Timmy Two-Times” who, a la Goodfellas, says, “I’m gonna do some poppers, do some poppers” before walking offscreen. (Presumably to go do some poppers.)

This is to say her sense of humor is impeccable, a mix of absolutely stupid bullshit and fiercely perceptive commentary. Drew, a former editor for Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s various ventures, understands that the idea of the comedian as brave truthteller is, at this point in history, absurd and more often than not actively harmful. (Consider Joe Rogan or Bill Maher.)

Yet the power of comedy to express what straightforward drama so often cannot is undeniable, and Drew uses this to full effect. Furthermore, her decision to ground her trans coming out story in comedy is powerful on the level of genre: trans people were often the punchline to so many lazy jokes across all media made before (roughly) 2016. The People’s Joker reclaims the genre without announcing itself as so.

Drew creates a space for trans people to not merely be tragic, lost, or broken, but neither does she shy away from or fears lampooning the inescapably tragic, confusing, and heartbreaking aspects of being a trans person in a cis/het world. One could say that this impulse is also like the Joker himself: embracing the dark and disturbing and laughing at it. However, taking that to heart as an adult is, fundamentally, stupid as hell — a fact that Drew has no problem skewering either.

This radical reconfiguration of what people expect LGBTQ+ media to be is also present in the film’s visual style, which satirises and inverts the completely soulless way blockbuster movies are made. Nearly all of the actors in The People’s Joker performed entirely in front of a green screen, and Drew recruited over 100 animators to create the world (and additional characters) that appear throughout the film.

There is no attempt to make these different artists’ styles match or even flow together; instead, how things look radically changes from scene to scene. This pastiche literalises the pastiche Drew’s narrative makes of various iterations of Batman and pop culture at large, while also calling back to earlier queer artists such as Jack Smith (Joker the Harlequin is indeed a flaming creature), but also represents the multiplicity of experience.

This is not a singular tale of one woman realising who she is. Rather, it is an expression of multiple truths: Vera Drew is not The One, but multitudes, which means her story is not the definitive trans coming out story. Memoir often fictionalises, intentionally or unintentionally, as memories are unreliable. The vast array of styles, sometimes working with or against the emotional tenor of the story, is the truest way to express the finicky nature of experience on this earth. Again, it feels insane to say this about a movie that has a running joke about Kamala Harris becoming Two-Face, but it must be seen to be believed.