REVIEW / The People's Joker

The People's Joker (2022)

Directed by Vera Drew

Vera Drew's The People's Joker is creatively brilliant with a moving narrative, and she proves you don't need a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget to make an awesome film. Shot in five days for $25,000, with an army of volunteer animators and visual effects artists recruited through Drew's YouTube show, this DIY trans coming-of-age story wrapped in a Batman parody has more invention, heart, and genuine risk than anything Marvel or DC has produced in the last decade.

Drew plays Joker the Harlequin, telling an autobiographical story about growing up trans in the Midwest, coming to Gotham to pursue comedy, and discovering her identity through the worst relationship of her life with a character who looks suspiciously like Jared Leto's Joker. If I have any complaint, it's that the film is paced a tad too fast to catch all the nuances. But to be completely fair, I haven't watched one of those Hollywood, non-creative, comic book movies in many years, so was maybe contextually disadvantaged. Drew crams so much visual information, so many references, so many layers of meaning into every frame that you could watch it three times and still find new details.

The "anti-comedy" warehouse is hilarious, especially on a meta level. Joker performs in an underground space with other Batman villains doing edgy comedy in a world where laughter has been outlawed by the United Clown Bureau, a vicious parody of SNL and the Upright Citizens Brigade. The fact that Drew made this film on lunch money is itself meta anti-comedy. The People's Joker is an anti-superhero film, featuring queer and trans friends, anti-establishment in every frame. This is the revolution, not metaphorically but literally. This is what it looks like when artists seize the means of production from corporate overlords and make something that actually matters.

With the exception of maybe Deadpool, The People's Joker is the best superhero movie of this century. It's the only one that understands what Grant Morrison wrote 35 years ago: that the Joker possesses "super-sanity," an ability to perceive reality more clearly than the rest of us precisely because the character refuses to accept the world's absurdities as normal. Drew's Joker is super-sane in a world gone mad, and her refusal to conform, to be palatable, to apologize for existing is what makes her heroic.

The People's Joker made its debut in 2022 at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It was a wildly successful screening, and then was forced off the roster by a message from Warner Brothers that it had violated its copyrights, kind of like a false DMCA takedown enabled by the corrupt politi-puppets of the capitalist infrastructure. The mere fact that a Warner Bros. CEO, who was paid $165 million in 2025, attempted to frighten a young creative filmmaker with a bogus copyright claim, knowing full well that parody has been protected since the Supreme Court case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., is probably a good reason for movie pirates to target Warner Brothers films. Not that I'm advocating that.

Fortunately for us, Drew persevered, found distribution through Altered Innocence, and got the film released. Corporate intimidation failed. The movie exists. And it's magnificent. 9/10