JokerSave

Set in a dilapidated Gotham City around 1981, the film opens on Arthur Fleck — a 40-something failed clown-for-hire who lives with his ailing mother Penny in a tenement apartment in the Bronx-coded outer borough. Arthur suffers from a neurological condition that triggers uncontrollable bouts of laughter, often at the worst possible moments. He's a registered patient of city social services and takes seven different medications. He carries a card explaining the laughter to strangers because he cannot stop it once it starts. Arthur's only daily aspiration is to make people laugh as a stand-up comedian. He records his own jokes in a notebook between fragments of pornography and political ranting.

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 for losing the sign. His coworker, a man named Randall, gives Arthur a pistol "for protection" — without telling Arthur the gun is loaded. Arthur attends weekly visits with a city-funded social worker who barely listens to him. Gotham itself is reaching a breaking point: a sanitation strike has caused garbage to pile up on every corner. Wealthy elites mock the working poor on television. Crime is rampant. Mayor Stokes' administration is preparing to slash municipal services, including the social-worker program Arthur depends on. He has been quietly losing what little stability he had.

One evening on the subway home, three drunk Wall Street brokers are harassing a woman in the same car. Arthur's nervous laughter starts uncontrollably. They attack him. Cornered, he draws the pistol Randall gave him and shoots all three. He flees to a public bathroom and, instead of feeling guilt, dances slowly to a rhythm only he hears. Something has been unlocked. He goes home to find that the murders are dominating the news. The dead were Wayne Enterprises employees, and the killer is being branded by the press as the "Subway Vigilante." Working-class Gothamites — exhausted, angry, marginalized — start showing up in clown masks at protest rallies, treating the killer as a folk hero.

Arthur begins to fall 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 at a local club and laughs warmly with him. Meanwhile, Arthur discovers a letter his mother has been mailing for years — addressed to Thomas Wayne, the wealthy industrialist running for mayor. The letter claims Arthur is Thomas Wayne's biological son, conceived during Penny's time as a Wayne household servant. Arthur is shocked but excited. He sneaks into a charity benefit at Wayne Manor, confronts Thomas in the bathroom, and is told flatly that Penny was once a delusional housekeeper, that she fabricated everything, and that Arthur is no Wayne. Thomas punches Arthur in the face when he becomes too persistent.

Arthur's life unravels. He 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. He visits Sophie's apartment to confess his feelings — only to discover, in a quiet horror, that Sophie has never met him before. Their entire relationship has been Arthur's hallucination. The dates, the meals, the conversations: all in his head. He leaves her apartment without harming her, but the audience is left uncertain. He returns home, dyes his hair green, paints his face white, and calls a TV producer named Murray Franklin, the late-night comedy host Arthur has worshipped since childhood.

Murray's producers had earlier broadcast a humiliating clip of Arthur's terrible stand-up debut on television. Murray now invites Arthur on the show — to mock him further on national TV. Arthur agrees on one condition: that he be introduced as Joker, a name Murray once used dismissively. Before the show, his coworker Randall arrives at Arthur's apartment with the loyal little person Gary, ostensibly to console Arthur about his mother's death. Arthur kills Randall with a pair of scissors but spares Gary, telling him he was the only one at work who was kind to him. Gary leaves, traumatized.

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 his pistol out and shoots Murray Franklin in the face on live television, then turns to camera. The broadcast is cut. Outside, all of Gotham riots in clown masks. Arthur is briefly arrested, but a riot mob frees him from the squad car. He climbs onto the roof of the wrecked vehicle, blood smeared across his mouth like a smile, and dances. The crowd worships him.

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 image is the iconic origin of Batman, here recontextualized as the unintended consequence of a uprising Arthur had become the symbol of. The film's final scene cuts to Arkham State Hospital, where Arthur is now confined. He sits in a chair across from a psychiatrist, smiling. He looks down at her shoes; she has white sneakers. He stands up and walks down the corridor, leaving behind a smear of bloody footprints. End credits.

Joker (2019) is deliberately unreliable. Multiple sequences are clearly Arthur's hallucinations (the entire Sophie relationship). The exact relationship between Arthur and Thomas Wayne is left ambiguous — it might be true or might be Penny's delusion or might never have been settled by the film. Even the final Arkham scene is ambiguous; Arthur seems to be remembering or imagining the riots, suggesting much of what we've seen might be a story he's telling himself. The film grossed over $1.07 billion worldwide on a $55–70 million budget, becoming the first R-rated film to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Joaquin Phoenix won the Best Actor Oscar at the 2020 Academy Awards. The 2024 sequel Joker: Folie à Deux was a commercial and critical disappointment, but the original remains one of comic book cinema's most acclaimed entries.

Director Todd Phillips deliberately positioned the film as a stylistic homage to early-1980s Martin Scorsese, drawing especially from Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983). The casting of Robert De Niro as Murray Franklin, the late-night host who mocks Arthur, was a direct nod to De Niro's own role as the unhinged would-be comic Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher's grimy, fluorescent-lit Gotham bears more resemblance to the New York of Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin than to any prior comic-book film. The score by Hildur Guðnadóttir — the first solo woman composer to win an Oscar in the category — uses a single recurring cello motif that grows more dissonant as Arthur's psyche fractures. Phillips' refusal to make a traditional comic-book film, and Phoenix's commitment to a physical performance built around weight loss and choreographed nervous laughter, gave the film a tonal seriousness that audiences and critics responded to. Whether or not Joker should have been made within the DC architecture remains a contested industry conversation, but its commercial success forced Warner Bros' hand toward more director-driven Elseworlds projects, including Matt Reeves' The Batman two years later.