Joker is a portrait of a lost soul waywardly wandering his way through a meat thresher called 1980s Gotham City. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown who dreams of being a stand-up comedian, who cares for and lives with his physically and perhaps mentally ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy), and who suffers from a rare and unnamed neurological disease that makes him laugh when he gets nervous. When he is fired from his job for (unthinkingly, which is telling of his personality) bringing a gun to a gig at a children’s hospital, he kills three drunk Wayne Enterprises stockbrokers on the subway, nominally to stop them from assaulting a woman and, more immediately, from attacking him, but ultimately to let out his slowly encroaching agitation at the world. While Fleck starts a relationship with Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) and worships aged television talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), Joker strangles Arthur in a swampy miasma of social disarray and simmering economic and cultural tensions that look suspiciously like those effecting the United States circa 2019, and which have done nothing to abate in the ensuing years.

First things first: It’s not actually original, except within the heavily circumscribed container of the comic book film, either in its loose meditations on mental illness, or what Fleck, like Travis Bickle before him, would probably call “urban rot,” or its very Scorsese-esque depiction of a facsimile of post-‘70s New York, or in its rehashing of Batman’s most famous, and most negative-mirror-image-of-himself, antagonist. Joker really, and unapologetically, is just an inferior rehash of Taxi Driver meets The King of Comedy, and its strengths are inseparable from the viscous brutality and nervous energy of those two classics of frayed New York discombobulation and neoliberal deregulation.

The thing is: Joker is a pretty pungent pistol-whip of a film. While copping from Taxi Driver is old hat in the world of “serious” and “not-so-serious” (and “why-so-serious?”) cinema, King of Comedy remains mostly uncharted territory, even all these years later. Like that acid-bath parody of domesticated masculinity, Joker is a shiv of a character study, from Joaquin Phoenix’s toxically limber evocation of self-destructive animosity to De Niro’s own exploration of his own cinematic history in his appearance as Franklin, the embodiment of Rupert Pupkin’s wildest milquetoast desires. I didn’t think writer-director Todd Phillips (cowriting with Scott Silver), he of The Hangover fame, had it in him.

Except, of course, a quick squint suggests that Joker very much is a Phillips production. In its semi-thoughtful dissection of troubled masculinity as a (in this film, quite literal) dance with one’s own unacknowledged trauma, Joker extends themes established in Phillips’ earlier comedies, a genre that Joker elects to endorse. Also trademark Phillips: its somewhat overbearing, somewhat forced, somewhat immature attitude toward the political realm. The things that make Joker tick aren’t so different from the things that would have made it (and maybe do make it) awful, and troubling, and troublingly awful, and awfully troubling. It’s obvious, and sort of conceited, and kind of cloying, but I also suspect that avoiding its more limited impulses might have just kept it away from the energy that feeds it: its need to scratch at its own desire to be a pop-fantasia of American discontent.

While it is arguably best as a character study, this itch also necessitates that the film position its narrative of disturbing self-actualization not only as a private enactment of personal reincarnation but a scattershot public reckoning. Joker hopes to mine a vein of distinctly collective dissatisfaction to etch a portrait of undiagnosed societal trauma rather than merely personal mania. It scores a few points in this direction. The ambiguity surrounding Fleck’s lineage, the tenuous veracity of what Fleck believes is a familial tie to Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), father of young Bruce Wayne, works fantastically to anonymize Fleck – to frame him as a general archetype for the masses – while still allowing us to focus primarily on him. While Fleck clearly desires to accept the very norms of good decorum and individual legitimacy that social elites use to oppress him, he finally becomes an anonymous cipher for a wider human swarm. Their connection to Wayne is irrelevant, and their politics are thus not laundered in narratives of personal family background.

Joker formalizes this tension between individual and collective by consistently vacillating between focal points in the frame to suggest variegated levels of myopia and openness to the wider world that Fleck is both frustrated with, horrified by, reflective upon, and unable to fully diagnose. His repeated recourse, like De Niro’s Travis Bickle, to questions of social decorum and “niceness,” suggest a man searching for an apolitical solution to a deeply political problem, a figure who is both an embodiment of and a distraction from the real problems, the class inequalities, hovering around him. At times, the film explores this relation in the frame itself, shifting between Fleck’s individual and social selves, between him as he sees himself and him as he sees it and himself as the world sees him and himself as he bristles against the world.

Phillips’s film also looks and sounds phenomenal, with the mise-en-scène recalling the cluttered confusion of the Depression filtered through the malarial color of ‘70s cinema. In contrast to the kaleidoscopic overdrive and muscular Frank Frazetta abstraction of Mad Max: Fury Road’s high contrast orange-and-teal coloring, Lawrence Sher’s cinematography turns the same color palate into a sickeningly hazy blur. It suggests a cosmic leeching that climaxes in Fleck’s appearance on the Murray Franklin Show, where the orange and blue curtains announce the coming into being of the man as a collective cipher, a televisual icon whose personality embodies a politics even while claiming otherwise. Sher also dons and complicates Gordon Willis’s eye-lighting trick, denying light to the eyes to produce pools of darkness that, in this case, hide pinpricks of white malevolence in the middle. His pupils become glimmers of morbid possibility, dark illuminations of the soul, reflecting both his dreams of another world and his interference with this one.

Most compelling is how the film mines an entirely different set of 1930s signifiers and sensibilities than the Gothic Expressionism of the Burton films or the Art Deco atmosphere of the comics and DC Animated Universe. Joker limns the Great Depression populism of pre-Code crime dramas in its look and vibe and of early cinematic physical comedies in its sense of movement and interest in achievement through chaos. In its self-description as a comedy, Joker turns not to a narrative of personal overcoming through sheer contingency (“that’s life,” the song that accompanies Fleck in one scene goes) but to a kind of molestation of comic heroism: this is a world in which one’s belief in one’s own martyrdom – the idea that one is destined for success on the terms one imagines – inevitably fails, but in which the attempt produces change nonetheless.

Neat stuff, and, whatever else Joker doesn’t do, it certainly does break new ground in the world of “Marvel and DC” cinema, impoverished though that standard can be. I’m not really sure that anything it accomplishes can’t be found in a half-dozen forgotten B-tier pictures in your average Times Square Theater in, say, October 1975, but it’s not like mid-tier ‘70s thrillers are thick-on-the-ground these days. Plus, Phillips’ unctuous, twitchy, violently playful textures keep the film from the antiseptic, self-serious lows of one of the lesser David Fincher films. If Joker still exhibits a lower-temperature version of the breathful braying for social relevance that consumes the fire of so many comic book adaptations, its griminess, even if obviously manicured, still somehow earns itself. It feels earnestly calculated, authentically inauthentic, thoughtfully thoughtless, and it works.

Score: 7.5/10