Have you ever heard the saying “The feel good movie of the year”? Joker isn’t that movie. As one would expect, nothing good happens to the man we watch become the Joker.

Gotham City is a rough place to live in. Arthur Fleck is one of its citizens and every day is a challenge. Struggling to make ends meet while living and caring for his ill mother, Arthur doesn’t have too much to look forward to. He has to maintain his own psych meds along with his mother’s medication and scrape up enough money for rent and food. There are times when he forgoes food to ensure his mother has something to eat. He takes small jobs as a clown (store sales, hospital visits) with his ultimate dream to be a stand-up comedian. He also has a condition called Pseudobulbar Affect which causes him to laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate times. The highlight of his day is watching the Murray Franklin Show with his mom.

The movie wastes no time in starting Arthur’s descent into madness. He’s mugged and held financially responsible for the loss of the store’s sign. A co-worker gives him a gun for protection and the man soon lies about the gun to make Arthur look worse when he gets caught with it, leading to the loss of his job at the entertainer placement agency. Layer by layer, a man who for a long time has questioned his place and identity in the world gets more and more taken from him. This pollutes his mind and when cornered on the subway, he fights back with violence. At first spooked by the ordeal, he quickly comes to terms with it–with no remorse. On top of that, news of what he did hits the media and while no one knows it was him who killed those men, for the first time he feel useful. That he’s done something that people have noticed, he’s changed the world. Even though that change is bad, the feeling becomes intoxicating and he becomes more aggressive.

Joker isn’t the first movie to explore a person psychologically breaking, so it doesn’t really tread new ground in that regard. The main character being from comic books changes the expectations though. But let’s be clear, this isn’t a superhero movie. Despite the Joker not having a definitive origin (there are many stories over the decades) everyone knows what he is in the end: a monster. So where this movie goes is no surprise. With all of the violence reported in the world today, it makes a character like this all the more topical and scary.

And the movie does use the fear of mental illness as one of it’s biggest attention-grabbing features. “‘Crazy’ people are dangerous” is the lazy and untrue go-to idea everyone tends to lean on. I never got the feeling that it exploited this idea though as Arthur is a complex character. I was watching someone’s world fall away bit by bit and left with not knowing which way was up anymore. When someone needs help and they have no support, it compounds problems.

Arthur’s problems aren’t simple. Pseudobulbar Affect–caused by brain trauma or other brain degeneration conditions–is painful both physically and emotionally. He gasps for air, he chokes on his saliva, and it’s embarrassing because it’s loud and uncontrollable. It’s a social nightmare he’s had to deal with for as long as he can remember. Long before we meet him, Arthur has been struggling. Then he loses his social worker due to budget cuts, removing his access to his medication and one of the few people he’s able to talk to about his life. Couple that with physical violence and a massive revelation about his mother, Arthur loses any kind of grounding he ever had. I never got the impression that I was supposed to be sympathetic to what Arthur does.

I will say that Joker has a very narrow view of the world. The whole thing is from Arthur’s perspective and it never looks past what he sees. What happens around Arthur–due to his actions–the movie never explores. So any kind of social commentary is pretty vapid.

I see the arc of Arthur to be a bit like Erik Killmonger, the villain from Black Panther (for me the biggest highlight of that movie). Their backgrounds are completely different but the storytelling goal is the same, to give you plausible history and reasoning to make you understand why the antagonist wants to cause so much harm. You can understand what they are saying but recognize that it doesn’t justify what they are doing.

Nor do I think Joker glorifies violence as none of it is celebrated and there are no allusions to it being good or helpful.

I did find this to be one of the most suspenseful movies I’ve seen in awhile. Joaquin Phoenix is going to get a ton of acting award nominations for playing Arthur. I give him my highest praise as I completely forgot it was him on screen. He moves differently, he has all of these personal tics that become noticeable as you watch. The character truly changes from the beginning to the end. Arthur does his best to try to fit in, he’s constantly at war with himself. It’s like he’s so unsure of who he is, he looks to other people to mimic how they behave. He’s just guessing how to get by, like “Is this it? Is this ‘normal?'”

It’s a fraught journey through two acts and when Arthur puts on the full Joker outfit in act 3, it really blew my mind. I was literally seeing the comic book villain on screen, it’s him. And that’s really scary. You don’t want to be anywhere near this guy. Even the big bads like Two Face, Penguin, and Killer Croc are really nervous around him. What is he going to do was all I could think of. Joker is anarchy and there he was in the flesh for the second time (Heath Ledger being the first).

I really liked seeing the mixture of current social issues and comic book Joker. Here, since this is the beginning of the character, he has no grand plans. He’s not filling balloons with poison gas or putting bombs around a city. Here he sees the start of being able to influence and manipulate people. That’s always been a huge part of the character. And there are real world parallels that the movie uses here. The influence of media, the rampant economic inequality that’s spurning anger, and the growing phenomenon of the mob mentality. Everyone is chanting for justice and for Joker, that’s cold blooded revenge.

Joker pulls on a few more familiar source material motifs. From the amazing hospital scene with Joker talking to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight:

You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
[Joker hands Two-Face a gun and points it at himself]
Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!

This is basically what happens with Arthur’s confrontation on the subway with the men who turn out to work at Wayne Enterprises. People get abused and killed on the streets of Gotham all the time and no one bats an eye. But if it’s a well off white-collar worker? Tragic, headline news. This is one of Arthur’s biggest grievances with society and leads him to another keystone of the Joker manifesto: everyone sucks, everyone is mean, everyone is cruel.

And in the end, I think that last bit is what we’re all fighting against and the biggest message of this movie. Good versus evil means we all have to work together to make the decisions that keep us on the right track. Cynicism isn’t a virtue, don’t let that make you jaded, bitter, and isolated. The forgotten are people too, empathy goes a long way (which I think there is a huge lack of now with all the budget cuts to many social programs that will do way more harm than good). Work for other people the same way you would work for yourself. When society pulls up together, we all benefit.