Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is prestige comic book parody
25.04.2024 - 16:19
/ thefader.com
Every frame of The People’s Joker, the debut feature from Vera Drew, drips with an anarchist spirit. In theaters now, the film began as a lark during the COVID-19 lockdown, a gag that poked fun at the endlessly rebooted Batman franchise and its iconic lead villain the Joker. It eventually grew into a feature-length film with Drew as its lead Joker and enlisted dozens of friends and collaborators to create the dynamic, varied visual style.
Far from a cheap gag, The People’s Joker creates a one-of-a-kind comic book movie experience and a sincere, heartbreaking, and hilarious trans coming out story. Drew plays Joker the Harlequin, an aspiring comedian whose dreams take her from the suburbs to Gotham City. There, in the grime-and-crime-ridden DC Comics capital, she navigates love, rejection, and self-expression as she slowly transforms from meek comic to cultural terrorist surrounded by other staples from the Rogues Gallery like the Penguin and Ra's al Ghul.
The movie is an impressive work of autofiction (Drew works in comedy as an editor on shows like Nathan For You and Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave) that wrestles back control of the comic book from its mainstream audience (and the studios who exhausted the market). Drew, who is trans, wrestles with the pain of having her identity denied. She has an absent father while some of the more heartbreaking scenes show her trying to connect with her stern and unavailable mother.
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.