The phrase “this will be my Joker origin story” gets thrown around online quite often, but director Vera Drew has taken it to a new level with The People’s Joker, her trans coming-of-age film that parodies familiar DC superhero characters and comic book stories. The People’s Joker is playing in St. Louis at the Webster University Film Series from April 18-21 and Arkadin Cinema & Bar from April 26-28.
The People’s Joker started out in 2020 as a piece of parody video art, originally suggested by co-writer Bri LeRose, splicing together Todd Phillips’ 2019 film Joker and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever. Drew says seeing Schumacher’s 1995 installment of the Batman series was one of the earliest moments she realized she was trans.
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“Seeing Nicole Kidman in that movie, the way she looks, and how Batman looks at her, I remember sitting in the theater being six years old and thinking, Why do I feel represented right now?” Drew says. “I’ve always understood my identity through these characters because there’s always a bit of a subtextual queer aspect to them, sometimes more directly than others. Like the Joel Schumacher movies, those are basically just big expensive queer art films.”
As she got further into her own Batman-based project, it morphed from an abstract video art parody into something more personal. A narrative began to take shape. Drew saw that there was room for her to mythologize her own life using these characters and tell a queer coming-of-age story based around her experience moving to L.A. to do comedy and carving out spaces to express herself.
To accomplish the ambitious project, Drew crowdfunded the money for her budget and crowdsourced the help of 100 artists across disciplines who were looking for a creative outlet in the summer of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Everybody I knew from my artistic circles was looking for something to do, so I just put a call out to see who wanted to help out, and the response was overwhelming,” Drew says. Artists from all over answered the call, including many that did not work in film or television already. “That was exciting to me,” Drew continues, “because I realized this movie isn’t going to look like any movie that has ever existed.”
The result is an endearingly DIY mixed-media visual style that feels a bit like changing channels or a bizarre drug trip from one scene to the next, all anchored around a Hedwig and the Angry Inch-style one-woman show. Audiences see the story unfold via actors in front of detailed hand-drawn backdrops, animation, dolls, to low-poly 3D models that feel straight out of a Nintendo 64 game, and more.
Though it was a clear labor of love to make The People’s Joker, the road to getting it in front of audiences had its bumps. After the film’s first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in fall 2022, all subsequent screenings at the festival were canceled, citing “rights issues.” With that, the film went viral overnight in film circles. From there, Drew took time to recalibrate the film, showing it as secret screenings at other film festivals while she and her team sought out distributors, eventually connecting with Altered Innocence.
“I was already familiar with their catalog, and we couldn’t be more at home there,” Drew says. “All of their films are beautiful, experimental, queer coming-of-age films.” Having always imagined the film as a piece of underground queer art, Drew wouldn’t have it any other way.
The People’s Joker had its first true public screening at OutFest 2023, and the film is now doing a roadshow-style release, playing at arthouse theaters throughout the U.S. and garnering critical acclaim along the way, including from idiosyncratic New Yorker critic Richard Brody. As St. Louis audiences finally get their chance to see The People’s Joker at the Webster University Film Series and Arkadin Cinema & Bar, Drew hopes that audiences can experience just how universal trans stories are.
“Based on the people who come up and talk to me after screenings, they’re often filmmakers and other beautiful weirdos who want to make aggressively queer art, like me,” Drew says. “I hope the thing they take away from this is that you can tell your story in an honest, direct, and unsanitized way, and you can do it in genre space too where it’s funny, it has heart, and it has a sense of realistic, hopeful optimism.”
The People’s Joker is playing in St. Louis at the Webster University Film Series from April 18-21 and Arkadin Cinema & Bar from April 26-28.
