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Joker gives its infamous central character a chillingly plausible origin story that serves as a brilliant showcase for its star -- and a dark evolution for comics-inspired cinema.

Critics Reviews

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Todd Phillips

Joaquin Phoenix

Arthur Fleck

Robert De Niro

Murray Franklin

Zazie Beetz

Sophie Dumond

Frances Conroy

Penny Fleck

Brett Cullen

Thomas Wayne

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In mainstream movies today, "dark" is just another flavor. Like "edgy," it's an option you use depending on what market you want to reach. And it is particularly useful when injected into the comic book genre.   

Darkness no longer has much to do with feelings of alienation the filmmaker wants to express or purge, as was the case with a film like " Taxi Driver ." It's not about exploring uncomfortable ideas, as was done in " The King of Comedy ." Do you think Todd Phillips , who co-wrote and directed "Joker," and references those movies so often you might expect that  Martin Scorsese  was enlisted as an executive producer here as a way of heading off a plagiarism lawsuit (he dropped out not too long after signing on, however), really cares about income inequality, celebrity worship, and the lack of civility in contemporary society? I don't know him personally but I bet he doesn't give a toss. He's got the pile he made on those "Hangover" movies—which some believe have indeed contributed to the lack of civility in etc.—and can not only buy up all the water that's going to be denied us regular slobs after the big one hits, he can afford the bunker for after the bigger one hits.

Which is not to go so far as to say that if you buy into "Joker," the joke's on you. (Except in the long run it really is.) If you live to see Joaquin Phoenix go to performing extremes like nobody's business, this movie really is the apotheosis of that. As Arthur Fleck, the increasingly unglued street clown and wannabe stand-up comic down and out in what looks like 1980s Gotham (although who knows what period detail looks like in fictional cities), Phoenix flails, dances, laughs maniacally, puts things in his mouth that shouldn't go there, and commits a couple of genuinely ugly and disgusting crimes with ferocious relish.

Much has been made, by Warner, and I guess DC Comics, of the fact that this is meant as a "standalone" film that has no narrative connection to other pictures in the DC Universe, but that's having your cake and eating it too when you still name your lunatic asylum "Arkham" and your cinematic DC Universe is changing its Batmen every twenty minutes anyway. Maybe what they really mean is that this is the first and last DC movie that's going to be rated R.

A rating it thoroughly earns. The violence in this movie means to shock, and it does. Fleck's alienation in the early scenes evokes Travis Bickle's, but this movie is too chicken-livered to give Fleck Bickle's racism, although it depicts him mostly getting hassled by people of color in the first third. Fleck is also fixated with a Carson-like talk-show host played by Robert De Niro , reversing the "King of Comedy" player positions. He also likes the black woman down the hall from him, played by Zazie Beetz . The casting is not just meant to give the movie bragging rights on the zeitgeist curve, but to evoke Diahnne Abbott in both "Taxi Driver" and "Comedy." Fleck's seemingly successful wooing of the character is a jaw-dropper that had me thinking Beetz ought to fire her agent, but a late-game clarification makes it … well, forgivable is not quite the word, but it will do.

As Gotham begins to burn (the civil unrest starts with a garbage strike), Fleck, who has been taken as a vigilante by much of the city's 99%, doesn't quite know what to make of his underground cult stardom. (The city is beset by rioters in clown makeup and clown masks; because this movie is rather suddenly behind the curve in "clowns-are-scary" awareness—only Pennywise gets a special dispensation these days—these sequences look like "The Revolt of the Juggalos" or something equally laughable.) His mom ( Frances Conroy , the poor woman) has been writing letters to her former employer, the magnate Thomas Wayne, and Arthur opens one of the missives and reads them, learning something disturbing. 

The storyline in and of itself is not a total miss. But once the movie starts lifting shots from " A Clockwork Orange " (and yes, Phillips and company got Warners to let them use the Saul Bass studio logo for the opening credits, in white on red, yet) you know its priorities are less in entertainment than in generating self-importance. As social commentary, "Joker" is pernicious garbage. But besides the wacky pleasures of Phoenix's performance, it also displays some major movie studio core competencies, in a not dissimilar way to what "A Star Is Born" presented last year. ( Bradley Cooper is a producer.) The supporting players, including Glenn Fleshler and Brian Tyree Henry , bring added value to their scenes, and the whole thing feels like a movie. The final minutes, which will move any sentient viewer to mutter "would you just pick a goddamn ending and stick to it?" are likely an indication of what kind of mess we would have had on our hands had Phillips been left entirely to his own cynical incoherent devices for the entire runtime. Fortunately, he gets by with a little help from his friends. 

This review was originally filed from the Venice Film Festival on August 31st. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck / Joker
• Zazie Beetz as Sophie Dumond
• Robert De Niro as Murray Franklin
• Brett Cullen as Thomas Wayne
• Frances Conroy as Penny Fleck
• Douglas Hodge as Alfred Pennyworth
• Shea Whigham as GCPD Detective
• Marc Maron as Ted Marco
• Hildur Guðnadóttir

Cinematographer

• Lawrence Sher
• Scott Silver
• Todd Phillips

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‘Joker’ Review: Are You Kidding Me?

Todd Phillips’s supervillain origin story starring Joaquin Phoenix is stirring up a fierce debate, but it’s not interesting enough to argue about.

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‘Joker’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Todd phillips narrates a sequence from “joker.”.

Hi, this is Todd Phillips. I’m the director of “Joker.” So this scene is interesting because it’s right after a life-changing cataclysmic event in Arthur’s life, and he’s found this little kind of rundown park bathroom to go in and collect his thoughts and get himself together. What’s interesting about this scene to me is it’s entirely different than what we had scripted. In the script, Arthur was to come into the bathroom, hide his gun, wash off his makeup, and staring at himself in the mirror like what have I done. And when we got to the set on the day, Joaquin and I just sort of stood around like, this doesn’t really seem very Arthur. Why would Arthur care to hide his gun? And we really kind of tossed around a million ways to just do something different. And it was about an hour into it and I said, hey, you know, I got this piece of music from Hildur. Hildur Gudnadottir is our composer, and she’d been sending me music throughout, while we were shooting. And I just wanted to play Joaquin this piece of music. And Joaquin just started to dance to the music, and it was just me and him alone in the bathroom. There’s 250 people on the crew waiting outside. And he just starts doing this dance, and we both kind of look at each other and said, O.K., that’s the scene. It made sense to us because when I first met with Joaquin and we first started talking about “Joker,” I talked to him that Arthur is one of those people that has music in him. So music and dance became a theme in the film. And this is the second time we see him dancing, and it’s a little bit of Joker coming out, a little bit more than the scene before and a little bit less than the next time we see him dance. [MUSIC PLAYING]

By A.O. Scott

Since its debut a few weeks ago at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize , Todd Phillips’s “ Joker ” has stirred up quite a tempest. Hands have been wrung about the movie’s supposed potential to inspire acts of real-life violence, and criticism of its brutal nihilism has been met with a counter-backlash, including from Phillips himself, who has been sounding off about the “far left” and “woke culture” and other threats to the ability of a murderous clown to make money unmolested. Meanwhile, the usual armies of skeptics and fans have squared off with ready-made accusations of bad faith, hypersensitivity and quasi-fascist groupthink.

We are now at the phase of the argument cycle when actual ticket buyers have a chance to see what all the fuss is about, which means that it’s also time for me to say my piece. And what I have to say is: Are you kidding me?

To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. “ Joker ,” an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that. Besotted with the notion of its own audacity — as if willful unpleasantness were a form of artistic courage — the film turns out to be afraid of its own shadow, or at least of the faintest shadow of any actual relevance.

It barely even works within the confines of its own genre, the comic-book movie. “Joker” is a supervillain origin story, involving a character whose big-screen résumé already includes three Oscar winners (two for other roles, but still). It’s not hard to see the appeal. The Joker, an embodiment of pure anarchy, can be played light or heavy, scary or fun or all at once. He can sneer like Jack Nicholson, snarl like Heath Ledger or … I’m still not sure what Jared Leto was doing, but never mind.

As embodied by Joaquin Phoenix, he laughs a lot — enough to ensure that no one else will. The hallmark of this “Joker” is its solemn witlessness. You might wonder how this could be the work of the same Todd Phillips who directed “The Hangover” and “Road Trip,” which have at least a reputation for being funny. The cleverest bit here is casting Robert De Niro as a late-night, Carsonesque talk-show host similar to the one played by Jerry Lewis in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.” In that movie, De Niro was the crazy stalker, a talentless wannabe presuming to breathe the same air as his idol and quarry. This time out, he’s in the big chair, feeding the celebrity obsessions of Arthur Fleck.

That’s the Joker’s alter ego: a lonely, damaged man eking out an abject living as a clown-for-hire and living in a drab apartment with his mother (Frances Conroy). Phillips, who wrote the script with Scott Silver, takes us back to the bad old days of Gotham City, when work was scarce, rats were rampant and a garbage strike fouled the streets. Fleck is bullied by thieving poor kids and drunken rich guys, goaded to the point of murder by the meanness of the world. He has a crush on a neighbor (Zazie Beetz) that he thinks might be reciprocated. He keeps a notebook full of stand-up material and works up the nerve to go onstage at a nightclub open-mic night.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these plot points, or with the details that knit “Joker” into the familiar Batman world. Arthur has a connection to the Wayne family — we meet Alfred the butler and young Bruce — and also to Arkham Asylum. The problems arise when the film revs its allegorical engine and Phoenix tries to assemble a character from the tics and tropes he has been given.

Skinny, twitchy and at times startlingly graceful — Phoenix is one of the modern screen’s underrated dancers — Arthur has a physical and psychological resemblance to Freddie Quell, the misfit drifter Phoenix played in “The Master.” But he also carries the burden of being a victimized Everyman in a parable that can’t get its story straight. Arthur’s uncontrollable laughter arises from a medical condition that is possibly the result of childhood abuse. His profound alienation also arises from social inequality, the decline of civility, political corruption, television, government bureaucracy and a slew of other causes. Rich people are awful. Poor people are awful. Joker’s embrace of radical evil becomes a kind of integrity.

Or something. It’s hard to say if the muddle “Joker” makes of itself arises from confusion or cowardice, but the result is less a depiction of nihilism than a story about nothing. The look and the sound — cinematography by Lawrence Sher, cello-heavy score by Hildur Gudnadottir — connote gravity and depth, but the movie is weightless and shallow. It isn’t any fun, and it can’t be taken seriously. Is that the joke?

Rated R. Killer clown stuff. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.

A.O. Scott is the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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‘joker’: what the critics are saying.

Reviews are in for Todd Phillips' standalone origin story 'Joker,' which stars Joaquin Phoenix as the iconic villain.

By Trilby Beresford

Trilby Beresford

Associate Editor

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Reviews are in for Todd Phillips’ standalone origin story  Joker , which stars Joaquin Phoenix as the iconic villain. 

The film, written by Phillips and Scott Silver, is described as a gritty portrayal of a character ostracized by society. Robert De Niro, Marc Maron and Zazie Beetz also star.

For The Hollywood Reporter , David Rooney declares the film “grippingly atmospheric,” highlighting the sensational, unsettling and weirdly affecting performance from Phoenix who inhabits the Joker with an insanity both pitiful and fearsome. “He brings pathos to a pathetically disenfranchised character,” emphasizes the critic. Rooney goes on to suggest that since the screenplay is smartly written, anchoring the story “in a fiercely divided city with echoes of a contemporary, morally bankrupt America,” the movie may well appeal to a wide audience that includes those who don’t typically seek out superhero fanfare. Praising the cinematography by Lawrence Sher and production design by Mark Friedberg, both of which visually support the protagonist’s “simmering psychosis,” Rooney concludes that this “neo-noir psychological character study” is “arguably the best Batman-adjacent movie since The Dark Knight .”

Jim Vejvoda writes in IGN , “Drawing its spirit and style from classic ’70s and ’80s films like Taxi Driver , The King of Comedy , A Clockwork Orange  and Dog Day Afternoon , director Todd Phillips’ Joker presents a Gotham City that is unmistakably a stand-in for the hellish New York City of the era.” The critic goes on to say that the film may ask viewers to empathize with its central protagonist, “but it doesn’t ask us to forgive him for his increasingly evil choices.” Noting that Phoenix’s character is in nearly every scene, Vejvoda describes feeling as if he were in “Arthur’s tortured headspace” for the entire time. He says the film belongs to Phoenix, who “delivers a tour de force.” Concluding his review, Vejvoda declares, Joker isn’t just an awesome comic book movie, it’s an awesome movie, period.”

Forbes critic Mark Hughes calls Joker one of the best films in 2019, noting that the performance from Phoenix is “fearless and stunning in its emotional depth and physicality.” He goes on to say, “The fact is, everyone is going to be stunned by what Phoenix accomplishes, because it’s what many thought impossible — a portrayal that matches and potentially exceeds that of The Dark Knight’s Clown Prince of Crime.” Hughes suggests that Phoenix will be a frontrunner at the Academy Awards, going so far as predicting a win for the actor. “The Joker becomes a living, breathing, human manifestation of evil, and the film serves to both demystify him and also make it clear that even what we “see” of his origin is subject to question — unreliable narrators being what they are, the Joker being the most unreliable of all narrators, and the fact of his literal humanness doing nothing to remove our awareness something purely cruel and monstrous resides within his soul.”

In CinemaBlend , Eric Eisenberg notes that the film is a “radical interpretation that requires a transformative, thoroughly committed performance, and it’s remarkable to see Joaquin Phoenix take this role and play it as though he were the first actor to ever take it on (and in a way, he is).” The critic writes that Phillips deserves recognition for his reinvention of the story’s classic setting, “with his vision of Gotham standing in sharp relief of the same city portrayed by Christopher Nolan or Tim Burton.” Eisenberg concludes his review by recognizing the film may be viewed as controversial, but that it opens up many conversations about what is real and what is fantasy.

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson writes that there is an “undeniable style and propulsive charge to Joker , a film that looms and leers with nasty inexorability.” He calls the film exhilarating in a number of ways, but notes that it also may be “irresponsible propaganda for the very men it pathologizes.” Lawson asks, “Is Joker celebratory or horrified? Or is there simply no difference, the way there wasn’t in Natural Born Killers or a myriad of other “America, man” movies about the freeing allure of depravity?” The critic is unable to answer his own question, at least, not after a single viewing. He suggests that viewers seek out Joker to answer this question, and others, for themselves. 

Tim Grierson of Screen Daily says that a noticeably gaunt Phoenix “never lets us forget that a monster will soon emerge, but he’s such a haunting figure that we lament when that transformation occurs. And although the actor skillfully illuminates Arthur’s pre-Joker disintegration, he also proves to be a pretty terrific Joker during the film’s final stretches.” Grierson declares that Phoenix’s take on the character is arguably the most human, and the most tragic. Echoing the words of other critics, Grierson writes that the film belongs to Phoenix, who offers a nuanced interpretation of someone who is helpless and troubled and struggling to find connection.

For the BBC , Nicholas Barber writes that Joker “is a dark, dingy drama about urban decay, alienation and anti-capitalist protests, with a distinctive retro vision and a riveting central performance by Joaquin Phoenix. Whether these differences make it much better than other supervillain movies, however, is open to question.” Barber praises the styling and other performances of the film, but ultimately calls it “a flimsy, two-hour supervillain origin movie” where the viewer is waiting for Arthur to become the Clown Prince of Crime. While Barber admits that he might revisit the Joker in a sequel, he argues that — and his review rests on this debate — the idea that Phoenix’s Joker is more mature and intelligent than previous supervillains is very questionable. 

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Film Review: ‘Joker’

Joaquin Phoenix is astonishing as a mentally ill geek who becomes the killer-clown Joker in Todd Phillips' neo-'Taxi Driver' knockout: the rare comic-book movie that expresses what's happening in the real world.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Audiences, as we know, can’t get enough of a great bad guy — the kind we love to hate. The worse he acts, the more we stare. Of course, the fact that we relish a villain doesn’t mean that we’re on his side; getting off on the catchy, scary spectacle of bad behavior isn’t the same as identifying with it. But in “ Joker ,” Todd Phillips ’ hypnotically perverse, ghoulishly grippingly urban-nightmare comic fantasia, Arthur Fleck ( Joaquin Phoenix ), the mentally ill loser-freak who will, down the line, become Batman’s nemesis, stands before us not as a grand villain but as a pathetic specimen of raw human damage. Even as we’re drinking in his screw-loose antics with shock and dismay, there’s no denying that we feel something for him — a twinge of sympathy, or at least understanding.

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Early on, Arthur, in full clown regalia, is standing in front of a store on a jam-packed avenue, where he’s been hired to carry an “Everything Must Go” sign. A bunch of kids steal the sign and then kick the holy crap out of him. The beating fulfills a certain masochistic karma Arthur carries around, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that we feel sorry for him.

Popular on Variety

“Joker” tells the story of Arthur’s descent (and, in a way, his rise), but it’s clear from the outset that he’s a basket case, a kind of maestro of his own misery. He would like, on some level, to connect, but he can’t. He’s too far out there, like Norman Bates; he’s a self-conscious, postmodern head case ­— a person who spends every moment trying to twist himself into a normal shape, but he knows the effort is doomed, so he turns it all into a “joke” that only he gets.

Arthur’s response to almost everything is to laugh, and he’s got a collection of contrived guffaws — a high-pitched delirious giggle, a “hearty” yock, a stylized cackle that’s all but indistinguishable from a sob. In each case, the laughter is an act that parades itself as fakery. What it expresses isn’t glee; it expresses the fact that Arthur feels nothing, that he’s dead inside. He’s a bitter, mocking nowhere man on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

For all two hours of “Joker,” Arthur, a two-bit professional clown and aspiring stand-up comic who lives with his batty mother (Frances Conroy) in a peeling-paint apartment, is front and center — in the movie, and in our psychological viewfinder. He’s at the dark heart of every scene, the way Travis Bickle was in “Taxi Driver,” and “Joker,” set in 1981 in a Gotham City that looks, with uncanny exactitude, like the squalid, graffiti-strewn, trash-heaped New York City of the early ’80s (you can feel the rot), is a movie made in direct homage to “Taxi Driver,” though there are other films it will make you think of. As the story of a putz trying to succeed as a stand-up comedian, it evokes Scorsese and De Niro’s satirical riff on “Taxi Driver,” “The King of Comedy.” There are also elements lifted from “Death Wish,” “Network,” “V for Vendetta,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Shining” and “The Purge.”

More than that, though, the whole movie, in spirit, is a kind of origin-story riff on Heath Ledger’s performance in “The Dark Knight”: the comic-book villain as Method psycho, a troublemaker so intense in his cuckoo hostility that even as you’re gawking at his violence, you still feel his pain.

Phoenix’s performance is astonishing. He appears to have lost weight for the role, so that his ribs and shoulder blades protrude, and the leanness burns his face down to its expressive essence: black eyebrows, sallow cheeks sunk in gloom, a mouth so rubbery it seems to be snarking at the very notion of expression, all set off by a greasy mop of hair. Phoenix is playing a geek with an unhinged mind, yet he’s so controlled that he’s mesmerizing. He stays true to the desperate logic of Arthur’s unhappiness.

You’re always aware of how much the mood and design of “Joker” owe to “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.” For a filmmaker gifted enough to stand on his own, Phillips is too beholden to his idols. Yet within that scheme, he creates a dazzlingly disturbed psycho morality play, one that speaks to the age of incels and mass shooters and no-hope politics, of the kind of hate that emerges from crushed dreams.

Arthur and his mother sit around after hours, watching the late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin (played, by De Niro, as a piece of old-school Carson vaudeville), and as much as we think Arthur should move out and leave his mommy behind, we hardly know the half of it. When he gets fired (for revealing a handgun during a clown gig at a children’s hospital ward), there’s a suspense built into everything that happens, and it spins around the question: How will someone this weak and inept, this trapped in the nuttiness of his self-delusion, evolve into a figure of dark power?

At night, on the subway, Arthur, still wearing his clown suit, is taunted and attacked by three young Wall Street players. So he pulls out his gun like Charles Bronson and shoots them dead. The case becomes tabloid fodder (“Killer Clown on the Loose”), and the sensation of it is that the denizens of Gotham think he’s a hero. That sounds like a standard comic-book-movie ploy, but the twisted commitment of Phoenix’s performance lets us feel how the violence cleanses Arthur; doing tai chi in a bathroom after the murders, he’s reborn. And we believe in his thirst for escape, because Phillips, working with the cinematographer Lawrence Sher (who evokes “Taxi Driver’s” gray-green documentary seaminess), creates an urban inferno so lifelike that it threatens to make the film-noir Gotham of “The Dark Knight” look like a video game.

Of course, a rebellion against the ruling elite — which is what Arthur’s vigilante action comes to symbolize — is more plausible now than it was a decade ago. “Joker” is a comic-book tale rendered with sinister topical fervor. When Arthur, on the elevator, connects with Sophie (Zazie Beetz), his neighbor, the two take turns miming Travis Bickle’s finger-gun-against-the-head suicide gesture, which becomes the film’s key motif. It’s a way of saying: This is what America has come to — a place where people feel like blowing their brains out. The relationship between Arthur and Sophie doesn’t track if you think about it too much, but it’s a riff on one that didn’t totally track either — the link, however fleeting, between Travis and Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy in “Taxi Driver.” Arthur, in a funny way, hides his brains (they’re revealed only when he passes through the looking glass of villainy). He’s got a piece missing. But what fills the space is violence.

Many have asked, and with good reason: Do we need another Joker movie? Yet what we do need — badly — are comic-book films that have a verité gravitas, that unfold in the real world, so that there’s something more dramatic at stake than whether the film in question is going to rack up a billion-and-a-half dollars worldwide. “Joker” manages the nimble feat of telling the Joker’s origin story as if it were unprecedented. We feel a tingle when Bruce Wayne comes into the picture; he’s there less as a force than an omen. And we feel a deeply deranged thrill when Arthur, having come out the other side of his rage, emerges wearing smeary make-up, green hair, an orange vest and a rust-colored suit.

When he dances on the long concrete stairway near his home, like a demonic Michael Jackson, with Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” bopping on the soundtrack, it’s a moment of transcendent insanity, because he’s not trying to be “the Joker.” He’s just improvising, going with the flow of his madness. And when he gets his fluky big shot to go on TV, we think we know what’s going to happen (that he’s destined to be humiliated), but what we see, instead, is a monster reborn with a smile. And lo and behold, we’re on his side. Because the movie does something that flirts with danger — it gives evil a clown-mask makeover, turning it into the sickest possible form of cool.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Aug. 31, 2019. MPAA rating: R. Running time: 122 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release of a DC Films in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, BRON Creative, A Joint Effort production. Producers: Bradley Cooper, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Todd Phillips. Executive producers: Richard Baratta, Bruce Berman, Jason Cloth, Joseph Garner, Aaron L. Gilbert, Walter Hamada, Michael E. Uslan.
• Crew: Director: Todd Phillips. Screenplay: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver. Camera (color, widescreen): Lawrence Sher. Editor: Jeff Groth. Music: Hildur Gudnadóttir.
• With: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Frances Conroy, Zazie Beetz, Brett Cullen, Brian Tyree Henry, Marc Maron, Dante Pereira-Olson, Douglas Hodge, Sharon Washington.

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• Cast & crew
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Arthur Fleck, a party clown and a failed stand-up comedian, leads an impoverished life with his ailing mother. However, when society shuns him and brands him as a freak, he decides to embrac... Read all Arthur Fleck, a party clown and a failed stand-up comedian, leads an impoverished life with his ailing mother. However, when society shuns him and brands him as a freak, he decides to embrace the life of chaos in Gotham City. Arthur Fleck, a party clown and a failed stand-up comedian, leads an impoverished life with his ailing mother. However, when society shuns him and brands him as a freak, he decides to embrace the life of chaos in Gotham City.

• Todd Phillips
• Scott Silver
• Joaquin Phoenix
• Robert De Niro
• Zazie Beetz
• 11.6K User reviews
• 717 Critic reviews
• 59 Metascore
• 121 wins & 247 nominations total

Top cast 99+

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• Murray Franklin

• Sophie Dumond

• Penny Fleck

• Thomas Wayne

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Which Real-Life Comedian Inspired 'Joker'?

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Did you know

• Trivia Joaquin Phoenix called perfecting the Joker's laugh the toughest part of playing the character.
• Goofs In one of the scenes, Joker is running in his big clown shoes and a second later he's running in his black street shoes.

Arthur Fleck : [written in notebook] The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don't.

• Crazy credits The Warner Brothers logo is the Warner Communications logo used in the 1970s and early 1980s, in fitting with this film's 1981 setting.
• Connections Featured in That Star Wars Girl: Joker Trailer Reaction and Breakdown (2019)
• Soundtracks Temptation Rag Written by Henry Lodge Performed by Claude Bolling Courtesy of Decca Records France Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

User reviews 11.6K

Perfect in every aspect..

• Aug 31, 2019
• How long is Joker? Powered by Alexa
• Is this an origin story for the Heath Ledger Joker or is this the same Joker from the comics?
• Did Joaquin Phoenix really go mad, losing 52 lbs. (24 kg) of weight?
• Who plays Batman, the other side of the coin, and why isn't he credited?
• October 4, 2019 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• 1150 Anderson Ave, The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA (Joker stairs scenes)
• Warner Bros.
• Village Roadshow Pictures
• BRON Studios
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $55,000,000 (estimated)
• $335,477,657
• $96,202,337
• Oct 6, 2019
• $1,078,958,629
• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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