Joker is such a gritty and twisted re-imagining of the Batman mythos that the only way Batman could exist in this new world would be as a fascist enforcer in the mould of Judge Dredd, looking to preserve the status quo, and perhaps thump down on the sub-human scum who repaid his father’s benevolence with death and chaos.

Back in the days when Batman first scowled through the comic panes at a generation of youths whose fathers and brothers and uncles and childhood friends were about to go to war, society still clung to its belief in the quintessential goodness of the patrician class and its unassailable right to rule, in all its patriarchal glory.

The masses, particularly the American masses, believed that wealth was an emblem and consequence of hard-work, success and moral probity (many still do). The more money you had, the better you were. These days the left-leaning zeitgeist favours the idea that the ruling elite is inherently corrupt, a view that’s perhaps closer to the truth of human nature than the one that was sold to the war generations.

The fortunes amassed by billionaires like Thomas Wayne are increasingly seen as fortunes stolen from the common man and woman, or at least made upon their breaking and broken backs. The billionaires of the 2000s have been re-framed as walking black holes of greed; sucking out souls, opportunity, money and autonomy from states and whole nations, in the process helping to create the very conditions of inequality, oppression and violence that figures like Batman spend their nights wading through and fighting against.

In this movie, the good guys aren’t necessarily good, and the bad guy’s aren’t necessarily bad. Hence the Joker isn’t some unknowable force of murderous mayhem like Heath Ledger’s, nor a gangster whose evils have been amplified by a vat of toxic ooze like Jack Nicholson’s, but a very real product of his domestic and social environment. This Joker is the most human incarnation of the infamous villain, and all the more terrifying for it.

The intensity of Phoenix’s performance – how he seems to inhabit the very bones of Arthur Fleck; how his face no longer seems his own – makes watching Joker a heavy, visceral, fascinating, and often extremely uncomfortable experience. It’s a staggeringly brilliant evocation of mental illness; a disturbingly detailed and earnest exploration of frailty and rage. Arthur’s trademark laugh, triggered at times of stress and trauma, is chilling to the point of being blood-curdling. Phoenix makes you believe in, and feel for, Arthur Fleck, even when he’s shooting men in the back or bludgeoning the head of a betrayer off a door-jamb. Even at the very apex of his madness, we feel for him.  He’s vulnerable. He’s the underdog. He’s capable of great kindness.

Arthur Fleck’s a good boy. He loves his mother. He loves chat-show host Murray Franklin. He wants to be Murray Franklin; he wants to be respected by him; he wants Murray to be his father. Arthur wants to make people laugh. He wants to be noticed. He wants to be famous. He longs to be a somebody. He wants to be loved.

But piece by piece, slowly but surely, Arthur’s innocence and certainty – his very reality – is stripped from him by the society and institutions around him, as everything and everyone that ever meant anything to him betrays or fails him. Each time a layer of his vulnerable psyche is pulled away it’s replaced by anger and madness until finally, tragically – and, of course, inevitably – all that’s left of Arthur is the raw, open wound of Joker – a name bestowed upon him by his fallen hero, Murray Franklin.

Heath Ledger’s Joker was closer to a trickster God from Norse legend than a living, breathing human being; a creature with no history, or connections: an agent of pure chaos. But his and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker share, if nothing else, a multiplicity of possible origin stories. Where Ledger’s ever-shifting tales about his disfigurement, his very Jokerness, are borne of lies and delusion, Phoenix’s Joker is composed of a roulette wheel of possible root-causes:  who and what made him?

Was it his mad mother? Was it his own sprawling mental illness? Was it ideological cuts in funding to mental welfare organisations? Was it the harsh realities of a life lived in a pervasive, dog-eat-dog capitalist society? Was it rising inequality between the very richest and the very poorest? Was it our narcissistic cult of celebrity? The emotional toll of being rejected and humiliated by two father figures (Wayne and Franklin)? The broth of resentment, cruelty and hatred bubbling away on the streets?

The rioting, discontented masses of Gotham come to revere Fleck/Joker as the emblem of their violent movement – the hero of the underclass – but the movie is careful not to make that same mistake. Even when Fleck/Joker delivers a speech live on camera, admitting to murder and raging at society, moments before executing Murray Franklin (De Niro’s casting as talk-show host Murray Franklin is a nod both to Taxi Driver, with which Joker shares not only De Niro, but much of its tone and aesthetic, and King of Comedy, in which De Niro plays a crazed narcissist and wannabe comic who holds a talk-show host hostage in order to secure his big TV break) he doesn’t exhibit the confident, steely oratory of a rebel-in-chief. His words are the garbled, urgent outpourings of a man whose brain is electric with grief and madness; a man who only moments ago planned to turn the gun on himself instead of on Murray Franklin.

If you aren’t rooting for and empathising with Arthur Fleck in the film’s first half, then you’ve got no heart; but if you’re still rooting and cheering for Fleck once he’s jettisoned the last of his fragility and humanity to fully become Joker, then you’ve probably missed the point somewhere along the line.

‘Joker’ blends past and the present, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, infecting us with the uneasy sense of a world, or worlds, constantly shifting beneath our feet: we’re us, we’re Fleck; it’s Gotham, it’s New York; it’s present-day, it’s the 1970s; people are real, people are illusions; Arthur Fleck is a good boy, Joker is a bad boy. The crowds that tear Gotham’s streets apart are products of the hubris and lies of capitalist demagogues like Trump, but their behaviour more closely allies them with the supporters of people like Trump. A bunch of angry clowns. What is truth, what is lie, who must live, who must die?

As Fleck travels through the flaming streets of Gotham in the back of a squad car, he looks like a man who finally gets the joke. The mayhem outside matches the mayhem inside his head. He doesn’t have to fit in anymore, because the world has changed to fit him. Moments later a stolen ambulance thumps into the squad car. Arthur Fleck is pulled from a glass-fringed aperture in the wreck of that rammed and wrecked squad-car. He’s laid on his back on the bonnet, helpless, bloodied and confused. The figure who soon takes his first steps upon the bonnet of that squad car, to riotous bays and cheers, is Joker. Arthur Fleck is dead, all vestiges of mercy and hesitation gone from his flickering mind. He is reborn. While Arthur might have let a friend who showed him kindness walk away from a blood-bath, Joker has no such instincts, as evidenced by the bloody footprints peppering the floors of Arkham Asylum at the close of the movie.

We begin and end the movie in a psychiatric facility. Given how unreliable the protagonist is – how many times we’re fooled by his false perceptions – how much of what we see in the movie is actually real? Is the Joker real… or is he fake news? Are we nothing more than a symptom of Arthur Fleck’s madness? The observers he’s always craved…

“You get what you fucking deserve…” utters the Joker. It’s a line that’s swiftly adopted by the rioters, becoming their mantra and mission statement. It could also be the movie’s; the nihilistic spine that runs throughout.

Did Arthur Fleck deserve what he got: a childhood of poverty, abuse and madness? Did Murray Franklin get what he deserved? Did the Waynes? Did those guys on the subway? Did Gotham?

Batman will one day be the hero that Gotham deserves, but Joker is the villain that it fucking deserves right now.

And it’s the movie we need.

VERDICT: 5 STARS