A $60m R-rated character study that grossed a billion dollars. Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar-winning lead in a film the studio almost didn't make.
Gotham City, early 1980s. Arthur Fleck, a clown-for-hire with a neurological condition that causes uncontrollable laughter, lives with his mother in a decaying apartment. He is fired from his clown work. His state-funded therapy is cut. He shoots three Wall Street commuters who are assaulting him on a subway car. The shooting becomes a city-wide story; the killer is briefly hailed by an anti-Wayne protest movement as a symbol.
Arthur progressively unravels and reconstructs himself as 'Joker.' The film closes with him being arrested for the murder of a popular late-night talk-show host on live television. The film's ending is ambiguous about how much of what has been depicted actually happened and how much was Arthur's delusion.
Joker is structurally an unusual studio property: a comic-book-IP film made in the visual and narrative register of 1970s Scorsese rather than the Marvel template. The film openly cites Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982). Robert De Niro, who starred in both Scorsese films, appears here as the talk-show host Arthur kills.
Warner Bros. financed the film at a $60m production budget — small for a comic-book property in 2019 — and treated it as a one-off art-house experiment. The film grossed $1.08bn worldwide, becoming the first R-rated film to cross a billion dollars. The studio's commercial expectations were dramatically exceeded.
Joaquin Phoenix lost approximately fifty-two pounds for the role. The performance is one of the most-physically-extreme leads in 21st-century American cinema. Arthur's body language — the shoulders, the spine, the strange dancer's grace that emerges when he is most-detached from reality — is the performance's structural achievement.
Phoenix won Best Actor at the 2020 Oscars. The performance has been argued about: some critics have seen it as a hollow imitation of Heath Ledger's 2008 Joker; others have seen it as a genuinely original take that refused to depict Joker as inherently cool or competent. Both readings have textual support. Phoenix's argument, in interviews, has been that Arthur is genuinely pitiable until the film's final fifteen minutes.
The film's release was preceded by significant cultural concern about whether the film would inspire violence — particularly from disaffected young men who might identify with Arthur. Theaters in several US cities deployed extra security. The FBI issued a brief advisory. Several writers and survivors of the 2012 Aurora Batman cinema shooting (in which a gunman murdered twelve people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises) wrote open letters asking Warner Bros. to reconsider the film's release.
No incidents of significant violence occurred during the film's theatrical run. The cultural argument about whether the film 'glorifies' Arthur or critiques him has not been settled. Joker is in some sense the rare American film that has been judged not only on its content but on what people fear other people will do with it.