Joker: Neon Movie Review

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix. Robert de Niro, Zazie Beetz, Marc Maron, Frances Conroy
Director: Todd Phillips

Intense, haunting, disturbing, unsettling, uncomfortable, uncompromising, deeply indebted to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, Hangover director Todd Phillips' take on Joker is nothing without Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck.

An alienated clown who's trying to get by in a struggling Gotham that's grappling with a descent into garbage strikes and class divides, Fleck is hanging on by the skin of his teeth, scrabbling from day-to-day with a world he's growing ever-more distant from and from humanity on every level.

Fleck's grip on reality is further tested by his relationship with his ailing mother (Conroy) - though there's some light in the form of a neighbour (Deadpool's Beetz) and in local talkshow host Murray Franklin (De Niro riffing on his own Murray Pupkin), both offering Fleck a connection to life and a future.

But as the class war and societal concerns strike, Fleck finds himself at a personal profound crossroads...

Joker is less a comic book film, more an intensely choreographed dance into madness and destruction, that forces you into sympathies for the devil.

Central to the maelstrom is an emaciated Phoenix, his whole frame racked by the condition that forces him to laugh when it's less than ideal, and whose laughs teeter dangerously close to sobs of desperation. Lithe, lissom and genuinely haunting, the incendiary Phoenix owns the screen from the moment the film starts to the time it ends.

While there are nods to the wider universe, Joker is less about the clown prince, more a damning indictment of a man falling apart with parallels to the politically uncertain times we currently live in.

It's here that Phillips and Phoenix team up to make something that's an unravelling in our narcissistic times, a dangerous mirror to edges of our society that may galvanise some more than it should or ought to. There are plenty of scenes of Phoenix's Fleck struggling - be it up endless flights of stairs, or sitting in empty rooms, Phillips doesn't scrimp on the visual imagery.

It's not all perfect - some of the supporting characters feel underused in the extreme slow burn of Phoenix's spotlight; much of the feel of the film is ripped from Scorsese's grimy playbook and there are questions over the mental health portrayal within.

But Joker is visceral and uncomfortable in the way cinema can get under your skin; this character study is one of the year's compelling best, a sickening portrait that's unsettling and unnerving.