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‘The People’s Joker’ Is a Comic-Book Fantasia More Authentic Than Just About Any Comic-Book Movie
Vera Drew's powerfully scathing film is an act of pure fan obsession, drawing on Jokers past to present who she is to the world.
She wears a green wig parted down the middle, white makeup with big jagged dark blotches around the eyes, a razory red lipstick grin, along with a purple jacket and fishnets that make her, in every way possible, a transgressive presence. Onstage, when she puts an inhaler up to her mouth and draws in a breath of Smylex, the feel-happy drug prescribed to her as a child, she’ll let out a cackle of laughter so derisive it sounds like she’s going to fracture her own rib. That sense of pain is the taking-off point for Vera Drew’s performance in “The People’s Joker.” Her Joker the Harlequin has a dead name — it’s uttered several times in the film — and we see her as a soft sensitive kid growing up, when she already felt like the girl she was inside and tried to reveal that to her shrew of a mother (Lynn Downey), only to get slapped down.
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