In the Flesh: The People's Joker

It’s been a hell of a year for micro-budget filmmaking, and actor/director Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is one of the most delightful entries in its weight class. With a visual sensibility somewhere between Adult Swim’s most aesthetically obtuse material and the crude collage and slapped-together animation of Wonder Showzen or, perhaps more relevantly, frenetic YouTube  shorts, The People’s Joker clearly relishes its lo-fi, outsider roots, even before the narrative makes this stance explicit. Drew’s film wants you to keep its artifice at the forefront of your mind. It consciously builds on that sense of constructed reality in a broad, Waters-esque way, and its satire is all the sharper for it, an economic necessity transformed into a conscious artistic tool. dThat kind of ingenuity is all over the film, from the rapidfire editing it employs to overwhelm the eye with garish, shifting colors in contrasting palettes to the ramshackle animated scenes where crushingly difficult subject matter is juxtaposed with childish visuals, rendering the mundane difficulties of the love lives of newly out trans people at once feeble and deeply intimate.

Drew is a delight in the lead role, her standup act — around which much of the film revolves — immediately recognizable as a harsh but loving sendup of the work of thousands of awkwardly edgy and socially withdrawn pre-transition trans girls. The film’s grasp on comedy is unusually solid, and its simultaneous realism on the subject of what the medium can accomplish and fierce loyalty to its small and sometimes frivolous domain is touching. Her insights into the unique hell of being a trans woman in an abusive relationship with a physically smaller and weaker trans masc partner are hard to hear, and Kane Distler does great work as her immediately recognizable first love, a shitty little man who nevertheless occupies a complex and powerful emotional place in her personal history. His obvious narcissism feels sketched with understanding and compassion, and Kane channels a wonderful sense of insecure anger and blind righteousness communicated through his stiff, affected body language.

The other standout here is Nathan Faustyn as the Penguin, Joker’s gruffly supportive best friend. He has a rare natural combination of griminess and warmth, the kind of thing that made a young Danny DeVito such star material. Woven through these charming performances is a story of realistic but beautiful reconciliation with an abusive mother, sharp commentary on the inner lives of chasers and their twisted relationship to trans people, and clear affection for Batman comics and movies which, when passed through an adult critical lens, are nonetheless exposed as obviously fascist and repressed. It’s a little bit self-flagellating, a little bit corny, a little ridiculous, but for outsider art to hit its mark, it has to flirt with those things. Drew’s movie pulls it off, and will I’m sure be a touchstone for young trans people in the decades to come.