Joker arrived wearing the costume of a comic-book movie and carrying the script of something far older and far stranger: a 1970s character study about a man the city decides not to see. Todd Phillips, until then a director of broad studio comedies, took the most famous villain in popular culture, stripped away the cape and the rogues’ gallery, and built instead a chamber drama about humiliation. The result is less an origin story than an argument — about who a society laughs at, and what happens when he stops finding it funny.

It works because of one performance held under enormous pressure. Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck as a body before he is a character — a spine bent the wrong way, a laugh that escapes like a cough he cannot swallow, a face that keeps arranging itself into expressions nobody asked for. Everything the film wants to say about loneliness and contempt, it says first through that body. The makeup comes later.

A character study in greasepaint

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker (2019) — Joker (2019)

The screenplay, by Phillips and Scott Silver, is structured as a long fall. Arthur is a clown-for-hire and aspiring stand-up in a Gotham that looks like New York during a garbage strike — grimy, broke, electric with resentment. He cares for his mother, keeps a journal of jokes that aren’t jokes, and absorbs one indignity after another with a smile he cannot control. The drama is dramaturgically simple and, for that reason, relentless: every scene removes one more thing he had been holding onto, until there is nothing left but the persona.

What gives the film its unease is how it handles the line between what happens and what Arthur tells himself happens. The script keeps pulling the floor out — a romance, a parentage, a televised triumph — and asking us to notice, a beat too late, that we wanted to believe it too. It is an old theatrical trick, the unreliable monologuist, and the movie commits to it with conviction.

Phoenix, body and voice

Phoenix lost some fifty pounds for the part, and the weight loss is not a stunt but a vocabulary: it lets him move like a man whose own skeleton has become a costume. The laugh — written into the story as a neurological condition, a thing that arrives without permission — is the performance’s masterstroke, because it forces Arthur to perform emotion he isn’t feeling and to swallow emotion he is. The much-discussed dance on the Bronx steps, largely improvised to a cello cue, is the moment the character finishes assembling himself: for once the body and the mask agree.

It is a big, exposed, deliberately uncomfortable piece of acting, and the Academy rewarded it with the Best Actor Oscar. Whatever one thinks of the film’s politics, the performance is not in doubt; it is the load-bearing wall, and it holds.

Scorsese’s inheritance

Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips — Joker (2019)

The film wears its sources openly. Taxi Driver supplies the alienated loner narrating his own decline; The King of Comedy supplies the deluded entertainer who confuses a talk-show stage with salvation. Casting Robert De Niro as the late-night host Murray Franklin is the boldest of these borrowings — the man who once played Rupert Pupkin, the fan banging on the gates of fame, now plays the gatekeeper, and the inversion does a great deal of the film’s thematic work in a single piece of casting.

This openness is also the film’s most defensible criticism. Joker is not original in its grammar; it is a superb act of synthesis rather than invention, a remix of Scorsese’s New York played in a minor, comic-book key. Whether that counts as homage or as borrowed weight is the argument the film has been having with its admirers and detractors ever since.

The sound of the fall

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is the film’s other great performance. Built around a low, scraping cello, it doesn’t underline the action so much as live inside Arthur’s chest — a drone that turns dread into something almost tender. Guðnadóttir wrote much of it from the screenplay alone, before shooting, and Phoenix is said to have moved to her cues on set, which is why image and sound feel grown from the same root. It won her the Oscar for Best Original Score, making her the first solo woman to take that award.

The billion-dollar argument

The reception was a phenomenon in its own right. Joker premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the Golden Lion, the first time a comic-book character had carried off a major festival’s top prize. It then grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide — the first R-rated film in history to do so — and collected eleven Academy Award nominations, more than any other film that year. The discourse was just as loud: a vocal argument over whether a film this sympathetic to a violent, aggrieved loner was a mirror held up to a sick society or a flattering portrait of one. The movie’s refusal to settle that question is, depending on your patience, its nerve or its evasion.

Our take

What endures is the craft and the central performance, not the philosophy. Joker is strongest when it trusts its actor and its composer and weakest when it reaches for a thesis about society it hasn’t fully thought through. Seen now — especially against its 2024 sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, which mistook the audience’s attention for license to lecture — the original looks sharper than ever: a beautifully made, derivative, genuinely unsettling character study that smuggled an art-house drama into the biggest franchise on earth. That sleight of hand is the achievement, and it is considerable.

Movie facts

Directed by Todd Phillips, from a screenplay by Phillips and Scott Silver.
Premiered at the 76th Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion; released internationally on October 2, 2019 and in the United States on October 4, 2019.
Stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, with Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Bill Camp and Marc Maron.
Grossed over $1 billion worldwide — the first R-rated film to reach that milestone.
Nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won two: Best Actor (Phoenix) and Best Original Score (Hildur Guðnadóttir, the first solo woman to win the category).
A stand-alone story set in an early-1980s Gotham, deliberately disconnected from the wider DC films.

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Director

Todd Phillips built his career on broad American comedies — Road Trip, Old School, Due Date and the enormously successful The Hangover trilogy — before reinventing himself with Joker. That comic pedigree is easy to mock but it matters: Phillips understands timing, humiliation and the mechanics of an audience laughing at someone, and he turns all three to dark ends here. Joker earned him Oscar nominations for directing, producing and co-writing.