Director: Vera Drew
Stars: Vera Drew, Lynn Downey, Kane Distler
Coming up as an editor for the inimitable Tim & Eric, Vera Drew was already bathed in a certain aesthetic akin to threadbare public access television, viewed through a lens of irony mixed with dead-eyed sincerity. A love for the losers. Her astonishing feature debut/memoir feels spiritually connected to the work of her former collaborators and inspired by the harsh vibes of a pirate broadcast. Something design to disrupt the regular order of things.
Using the DC universe as primer to contextualise and explain a number of complex and deeply personal stories about transness – both specifically hers but also more broadly, too – Drew has created a one-off that needs to be seen to be believed. Not even it’s various trailers available on YouTube can properly prepare you for this brashly joyous salvo. Which makes taking it in a bracing and uniquely riveting experience. It is, as they say, a lot. But that’s (part of) what’s so good about it.
A disclaimer at the top of the picture gives some suggestion of the legal wrangling with DC Comics that has allowed The People’s Joker to finally make it’s way around the world (it premiered way-back in 2022, making this a long journey for Drew). Now, in the winter of early 2025, it has finally snuck it’s way onto English shores. The long legs of the film couldn’t be more useful, for this is something one senses should just keep touring, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s intent for Memoria. A fire that shouldn’t go out.
Made over the course of years during COVID-19 with collaborators (animators, content makers, VFX artists and more) across continents, The People’s Joker is a theatre school monologue that feels like a solo project brought to life by a thousand voices. “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Joker” goes the opening line, riffing on Goodfellas and casting Drew’s net far-wider than the just boundaries of Gotham City. Movies, video games and the more insular avenues of social media message boards are also knitted into her viciously entertaining diatribe.
Drew’s Joker tells of growing up in the mid-west, finding escapism in the fantasies of Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s creation. It’s telling that Drew’s youthful breakthrough came via a Joel Schumacher variation of Batman (Forever is an overlooked gem). The exuberant queerness locked in much of Schumacher’s filmography cracked a number of eggs at an impressionable age. Griffin Kramer’s itchy-on-camera Young Joker perfectly exhibits the feeling of being uncomfortable in one’s own skin, and too inexperienced to articulate the complex feelings that come with gender dysphoria. Drew depicts Kramer floating through uncertain dreamworlds like the protagonist of a Flaming Lips song.
Drew’s comedy is abrupt, unapologetic, sharp and savage, and when she takes over the reins of her movie persona, evidences a level of nervous sensitivity that makes her easy to root for and empathise with, offsetting some of those harsher edges. The self-deprecating script for The People’s Joker is as smartly constructed and paced as a pithy stand-up routine. It imagines Drew’s Joker landing in a Gotham City comedy club, learning her trade of clowning among a hive of misfits and outsiders.
With Nathan Faustyn’s Penguin, Drew proposes an ‘anti-comedy’ theatre, corralling like-minded fools to engineer their own aesthetic outside of the stand-up mainstream. The importance of creating a safe, communal space where identities could be drawn into focus. Drew’s anti-comedy club – The Red Hood Gang – attracts a cavalcade of CG sprites that bring to mind the avatars of Grand Theft Hamlet; expressions of personality unbound by gender. Rebranding as Joker the Harlequin, Drew becomes smitten by Kane Distler’s Jared Leto-styled Mr. J. They commune, adorably, over abortion-themed pop song “Brick” by Ben Folds Five.
The People’s Joker stings when it places Drew in the disapproving gaze of her screen mother (Lynn Downey), sharing raw experiences of being antagonised and infantilised. For all it’s outre expressions of strutting gender-fluid confidence, it also nails the nest of shame and self-hatred all-too frequently tied into feelings of transness. Her tales of calling suicide hotlines for solace are brave and heartbreaking. Her musings on the life-saving values of comedy sharp like a diamond. Through sharing, Drew reaches out to audience members going through the same and tells them – us – that it’s okay. Through Drew, we’re seen, and given permission to have our own traumas. The People’s Joker is an overture to those for whom – to steal from Drew’s contemporary Jane Schoenbrun – there is still time.
That we have an emerging wave of trans cinema is deeply heartening, but it shouldn’t be mislabeled through convenience as a movement. Rather, these are disparate voices shouting out against a rising tide of intolerance and darkness because it’s too important not to. Drew’s personal take and its presentation – a glorious haze of lo-fi collage – is a singular slap across the face. A precious aesthetic variation on trad cinema. Fun, furious and fragile, I would love to see Drew carve out her own incredulous place in pop culture, cracking the door for an array of new voices to follow her through. If even a handful are as equivalently distinctive, we’ll be in a stronger place collectively.
The Lost Highway Hotel 