JokerSave

Set in a dilapidated Gotham City circa 1981, we open on Arthur Fleck. He's a 40-something failed clown-for-hire, lives with his ailing mother Penny in a tenement apartment, and suffers from a neurological condition that triggers uncontrollable bouts of laughter — usually at the worst possible moments. He's a registered city-services patient. He takes seven medications. He keeps a journal he calls his 'joke book' that is mostly empty, mostly the dark thoughts of a man trying to keep himself from disappearing. Arthur dreams of being a stand-up comedian on the Murray Franklin late-night show. He has never made it past an open mic.

Arthur's life is a series of small humiliations. Three teenage boys steal his sign and beat him up in an alley. His company manager threatens to fire him. His coworker Randall slips him a pistol — for protection — without telling Arthur the gun is loaded. His city-funded social worker barely listens to him. The city itself is rotting: garbage strikes, super-rats infesting tenements, mental-health funding cut, ambient class rage. One evening on the subway home, three drunk Wall Street brokers harass a woman in his car. Arthur's nervous laughter starts. The men attack him. He draws the pistol and shoots all three.

Arthur flees to a public bathroom and, instead of feeling guilt, dances slowly to a rhythm only he hears. Something has been unlocked. The killings hit the morning papers — three young Wall Street types murdered in a single subway car by a stranger in a clown mask. Across Gotham, sympathetic clown-mask graffiti appears on walls. A populist uprising forms around the figure of the unidentified killer. Thomas Wayne, the wealthy industrialist running for mayor, calls the killers and their supporters 'clowns.' The word becomes a movement.

Arthur falls for his neighbor across the hall, a single mother named Sophie. They go on dates. She supports his comedy career. She comes to his stand-up debut and laughs warmly with him. Meanwhile, Arthur discovers a letter his mother has been mailing for years — addressed to Thomas Wayne, claiming Arthur is Thomas Wayne's biological son. Arthur breaks into Arkham State Hospital and steals his mother's records. Penny was committed for narcissistic personality disorder; her son was adopted; she allowed her boyfriends to abuse Arthur as a child until brain damage was done. Arthur returns home and smothers his mother to death with a pillow.

Murray Franklin's producers had earlier broadcast a humiliating clip of Arthur's stand-up debut on television. Murray now invites Arthur on the show to mock him further. Arthur agrees on one condition: that he be introduced as Joker, a name Murray once used dismissively. Before the show, Randall arrives at Arthur's apartment to check on him; Arthur kills him with scissors in front of his small-statured coworker Gary, who Arthur lets live because Gary 'was always nice.' Arthur dyes his hair green, paints his face, dances down a long flight of stairs in slow motion to Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Part 2.

The Murray Franklin show is the film's climax. Arthur enters the studio, joins Murray on the couch in front of a live audience, and begins riffing about his life. He makes Murray genuinely uncomfortable. He admits to the subway killings and frames them as a meditation on what society does when no one cares about the people it discards. 'You decide what's right and wrong,' he tells the cameras. He pulls the pistol from his coat and shoots Murray in the head on live television.

Riots erupt across Gotham. Arthur is arrested, escapes the police car when his clown-masked sympathizers free him. He dances on the hood of the burning vehicle. The crowd watches him. He is, finally, seen. In a parallel sequence in an alleyway behind a movie theater, the rioters loot through Gotham's wealthy district. Thomas Wayne and his wife Martha exit a screening with their young son Bruce. A masked rioter steps out of the shadows and shoots both Wayne parents dead in front of the boy. The iconic origin of Batman is, here, recontextualized: it is the unintended consequence of an uprising Arthur set in motion.

Joker (2019) is deliberately unreliable. Multiple sequences are clearly Arthur's hallucinations. The exact relationship between Arthur and Thomas Wayne is left ambiguous. Even the final Arkham scene — Arthur, in a white-walled room, laughing while a psychiatrist asks what's so funny — is ambiguous; he seems to be remembering or imagining the riots, suggesting the entire revolution may have been his fantasy. The film grossed $1.07 billion on a $55 million budget. It remains, until Barbie (2023), the highest-grossing R-rated film ever made — and is widely cited as the moment 'serious cinema' and comic-book films found each other again.