Joker (2019) Review: Phoenix Burns Down the Room

🦇 This review is part of the DC Elseworlds – explore the standalone Batman and Joker films.

In 2019, Todd Phillips made a DC film with no interest in being a superhero film. No capes, no gadgets, no franchise connective tissue, no credits sequence teasing the next instalment. What Joker (2019) is instead is a character study in the Martin Scorsese tradition — a descent narrative about a broken man in a broken city, made with the visual grammar and tonal conviction of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, filtered through a DC Comics mythology the film uses as backdrop rather than blueprint.

It is, to be precise, a film about what society produces when it decides that some of its people are not worth the cost of maintenance.

Joaquin Phoenix won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Arthur Fleck. The night of that win felt like a foregone conclusion from approximately ten minutes into the film. This is a performance in the tradition of De Niro’s Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin — total submersion into a character who cannot be fully understood, only witnessed.

Ad

Joker (2019) (4K Ultra HD) (opens in a new tab)

The definitive home format. Lawrence Sher's intimate cinematography and the film's specific colour palette reward 4K HDR presentation.

The central creative decision of Joker is the right one: do not make a Joker film. Make a film about Arthur Fleck that ends with the Joker existing. The mythology is the destination, not the engine. What drives the narrative is something much more specific: a meticulous portrait of how a particular kind of social infrastructure — social services, institutional support, community connection — has been stripped away from a particular kind of person, and what the consequence of that stripping is.

This is not an abstract argument. The film makes it concrete at every turn.

Arthur Fleck: The Performance

Arthur Fleck is a failed stand-up comedian and hired clown in a Gotham that is manifestly not treating its residents well. He has a condition that causes uncontrollable laughter at the worst moments — a pseudobulbar affect that the film treats as a medical reality rather than a character quirk, with the specific, non-negotiable quality of an involuntary spasm. He lives with his mother, whom he cares for with the tenderness of someone who has no one else. He talks to a social worker who barely remembers his name. He is on seven medications that are about to be cut because the city is defunding social services.

What Phoenix does with this material is turn an overtly schematic figure — society’s discarded man, radicalised by abandonment — into someone specific enough to watch with recognition rather than distance. Arthur’s laugh is not funny. It is a physical symptom that arrives in silence and public spaces with the precise wrong timing of something uncontrollable, and Phoenix makes you feel its texture: the panic of a man trying to explain to a stranger on a bus that he cannot stop, the exhaustion of a person for whom a simple social interaction is always potentially catastrophic.

The transformation across the film is precise. Arthur Fleck does not become the Joker through a single act of villainy or a defining origin moment. He becomes the Joker because the Joker is the only identity he has ever been allowed to inhabit fully — the one version of himself the world responds to with something other than dismissal.

The transformation is not presented as liberation. That is the film’s most careful quality. The Joker is not a happy ending; he is the endpoint of a process of destruction. Phoenix never lets Arthur’s violence feel good, even when the film’s framing invites a momentary alignment with his perspective.

The Scorsese Architecture

Ad

Joker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Hildur Gudnadottir (opens in a new tab)

The Oscar-winning score on CD or vinyl. The cello arrangements are worth owning separately from the film.

The King of Comedy is the most direct reference point. Rupert Pupkin — Robert De Niro’s delusional would-be comedian in Scorsese’s 1983 film — dreams of television fame as an escape from a life the world has told him is inadequate. He constructs elaborate fantasy sequences of success. He invades the personal space of the celebrity he idolises. He is played entirely for discomfort, and the film refuses to validate his delusions even as it follows them.

Joker takes this architecture and shifts the register: Arthur Fleck’s fantasies are played not for dark comedy but for tragedy. The distance between Arthur’s real life and his imagined life is not funny — it is the distance between what was promised to someone who followed the rules and what they actually received. Robert De Niro’s casting as Murray Franklin, the late-night host who briefly elevates Arthur to a punchline and then invites him on the show when the footage of his public breakdown goes viral, is the most deliberate of the film’s references. Franklin is what Rupert Pupkin dreamed of becoming. The film’s third act is about what happens when the person being laughed at decides he has had enough of that arrangement.

Taxi Driver contributes the city-as-antagonist atmosphere, the sense of a metropolis in active decay that the most marginalised residents experience as a physical pressure. Lawrence Sher’s cinematography borrows from Gordon Willis’s work in that film — the handheld intimacy, the persistent close focus on a single face, the way Gotham streets feel populated by forces beyond any individual’s control.

Phillips and Phoenix worked on the script for years, and the structural discipline shows. Every scene is doing multiple things simultaneously. The social worker’s funding cut is not just world-building; it removes Arthur’s last institutional support at the moment he most needs it. The medication running out is not incidental; it coincides precisely with the escalation. Everything is designed.

Hildur Gudnadottir’s Score

The cello score is inseparable from the film’s achievement. Hildur Gudnadottir constructed the Joker theme around a repetitive, escalating string figure — not melodically flashy, but physically insistent in a way that makes the film’s emotional arc legible even when the surface is quiet.

The make-up scene — Arthur applying the Joker make-up for the first time properly, watching himself in a mirror, his body beginning to move differently — is a rebirth sequence shot by Phillips as a slow, uncanny transformation. Gudnadottir’s cello turns it into something genuinely moving: not triumphant, not horror, but something between the two that defies easy labelling. It is the film’s single best scene, and it requires the score to land.

The soundtrack won the Oscar and deserved it. Worth owning separately from the film.

Gotham as Social Commentary

The film is set in Gotham in 1981 — which is to say, New York in the early 1980s: the crack epidemic, the budget crisis, the garbage strikes, the crime surge, the specific desolation of a city that had given up on its worst-off residents. The production design creates a Gotham of crumbling infrastructure and institutional abandonment — subway cars covered in graffiti, defunded social services, garbage literally on the streets.

This specificity is what makes the origin work. The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a philosophical abstraction — chaos for its own sake, with no clear motivation the film ever decodes. In Todd Phillips’ film, the Joker is a symptom: what a city produces when it decides that some of its people are simply not worth the cost of maintenance.

The Wayne family subplot is the film’s weakest element. Thomas Wayne as a callous patrician politician functions as ideological contrast with Arthur but feels franchise-obligatory — a concession to DC mythology that the film doesn’t quite need. The story about Gotham is strong enough without it.

Is Joker (2019) connected to the rest of DC?

No. Joker is a standalone Elseworlds film, completely separate from the old DCEU and James Gunn’s new DC Universe. It exists in its own continuity, set in a fictionalised 1981 Gotham with no connections to other DC characters or storylines. Designed to be entirely self-contained, which is both its creative strength and its commercial freedom.

Is Joker (2019) suitable for kids?

No. R-rated violence, realistic depictions of mental illness deterioration, social poverty, and escalating murder. The tone is entirely adult. Not appropriate for children and challenging for most teenagers.

Did Joaquin Phoenix win an Oscar for Joker (2019)?

Yes. Best Actor at the 92nd Academy Awards. Hildur Gudnadottir also won Best Original Score. The film received eleven nominations total, making it joint most-nominated at that ceremony — extraordinary for a superhero-adjacent genre film.

What is Joker (2019) about?

Joker is a character study of Arthur Fleck, a failed stand-up comedian and hired clown in 1981 Gotham, gradually radicalised by institutional abandonment and social isolation. It uses the Joker mythology as the endpoint of a descent narrative rather than its premise. The film is about what cities produce when they abandon their most vulnerable residents.

Where does Joker (2019) fit in the DC timeline?

Joker is an Elseworlds project — its own standalone universe with no timeline relationship to the DCEU or the new DCU. The sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux (2024), continues the same continuity, but neither film connects to any other DC production.