Joker review: Powerful film stars a brooding performance from Joaquin Phoenix

Dir: Todd Phillips; Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy. Cert 15, 118 mins.

What do you get when you take a poor, mentally unstable loner and you treat him like trash? The answer given in Todd Phillips’s ingenious new feature is Batman’s arch nemesis, the Joker. Phillips gives us a portrait of the future super villain as a troubled young man, while Joaquin Phoenix plays him in a way that makes him seem both sympathetic and very creepy.

As first encountered here, Arthur Fleck is like a cross between Travis Bickle, the vigilante loner in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Rupert Pupkin, the would-be comedian in Scorsese’s King of Comedy. The presence in the cast of Robert De Niro (as a chat show host very like the Jerry Lewis character in the latter film) underlines the fact Joker is as much inspired by Scorsese as by the DC comic book universe.

Arthur is a painfully awkward figure, living with his very frail mother (Frances Conroy) in a decrepit apartment and eking out an existence as a party clown.

Gotham City has lost its way. It isn’t specified when the film is set but it appears to be the 1970s. The cinemas are showing porno films. The rubbish isn’t being collected. Rats are on the streets. Crime is rife. The gulf between the rich, represented by the would-be new mayor Thomas Wayne, and the rest of society is enormous.

Arthur can’t stand up for himself. He is on medication. When young thugs pick on him and beat him up in a back alley, he is powerless to stop them.

He is suffering from some mysterious medical condition which causes him to erupt into manic laughter at the most inopportune moments. He isn’t very amusing either. “Don’t you have to be funny to be a comedian?” his mother asks him at one stage, a question he declines to answer.

Arthur is touchingly devoted to his mother. She tells him stories about the rich and powerful Wayne, for whom she once worked. Wayne, though, is presented here as an aloof and arrogant millionaire who cares little for the downtrodden people of Gotham.

The tone of the film is even darker and more Gothic than that of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Phoenix’s Arthur may be vulnerable, but the more he is bullied the more grievances he stores up. “You’ve got to protect yourself. Otherwise you’re going to get f***ed,” a fellow clown tells him. The advice sets in motion the transformation into the malevolent figure with the rictus grin we know from all those other Caped Crusader movies. Not that Batman is ever referred to directly here.

Phoenix’s Joker is a heavier, more brooding and introspective figure than that of Heath Ledger in Nolan’s The Dark Knight. He doesn’t have Ledger’s quicksilver energy. He moves more slowly. However, when his malevolence is finally unleashed, he is just as effective a lord of chaos.

Action scenes are in relatively short supply. This isn’t a superhero movie and it takes some time for Arthur to get his chops as a villain. However, Phillips includes one brilliantly staged set piece on the Gotham subway, involving Joker, hundreds of protesters dressed as clowns, and two hapless police officers caught in the throng.

As viewers, we can’t help but identify with Arthur. Everybody picks on him. We suffer with him in the excruciating scenes when his comedy routines fall flat or when he embarrasses himself by misinterpreting the words and actions of others. It is a natural instinct to want him to succeed, and is therefore exhilarating when he finally stops stumbling and stands up for himself.

Director Phillips’ attitude towards his main character is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, Arthur is a murderous psychopath who can’t tell jokes and has a horrible, braying laugh. On the other, he is depicted here as a folk hero, wreaking havoc against a society which has ignored the poor and marginalised for too long. “They don’t give a shit about you… and they don’t give a shit about me either,” his long-suffering social worker tells him.

At times, the storytelling becomes very contorted as the filmmakers strive to make a nuanced character-based drama about a figure we are used to seeing presented as a one-dimensional baddie. There has been talk of a “DC Black” label, a series of movies, of which this is the first, focusing on the dark half of the superhero universe. If Joker develops into a franchise, the tensions are bound to increase. It’s very hard to make films about super villains which don’t either glamourise them or lapse into comic book cliche. This feature, though, is powerful and original, with much of the same kick as the Scorsese movies to which it pays such obvious homage.

Joker is released in the UK on 4 October 2019.