This is not a simple or easy movie for me to review. So I’m going to write the review in two parts, one right here, and I’m thinking about seeing it again tomorrow.

I grew up with the Joker, and know the character well, and I was unprepared – even left off-balance –  by the grim route Director, Todd Phillips took to tell this origin story of one of the most iconic and popular characters in comic book history.

As Batman’s long-time and wiliest nemesis, the Joker has a special place in the genre, but this movie went well beyond that. This is a brave effort Phillips was not afraid to try to create his own genre.

This Joker movie has also become one of those Hollywood Responsibility morality plays and dramas that are boring, predictable and irrelevant. They are always a publicity and revenue windfall for the studio.

This question of what is responsible in a movie is an argument that can never be won on either side.

So I’ll skip it.

I’m not sure, but a second viewing may bring me more clarity than I felt tonight. The film shook me up a bit, and that is a compliment.

But I’ll give the review a shot, being fresh from the theater. I may write another.

The movie was astonishingly good in some ways, most of them being the performance of a lifetime by Joaquin Phoenix and some gorgeous cinematography.

I should say what the movie is not:

It is not a comic book movie; it is not a superhero movie, it is not an adventure story.

It is a brilliant, even grinding,  psychological study of the severe mental illness and disintegration of a  savagely abused and hapless part-time clown, Mama’s boy, and loser. It is also apocalyptic, this Gotham is a bleak, dark,  violent and joyless place.

The tone is set from the opening scene when street thugs grab the Arthur Fletch’s  sign (he’s working for a shop going out of business), lead him on a chase, and then break the sign over his head. Like the Gotham City of the Dark Knight, the city is a horror, garbage and graffiti and sirens everywhere.

But Fleltche’s humiliation has just begun.

It’s well into the movie before the Joker character devolves into something we can recognize as the Joker and comes into the character we know, and are, in my case, waiting for.

As played by Joaquin Phoenix, this Joker is a smoldering time bomb.

The movie could not possibly be any darker, and it’s clear there is a message:

Phillips is trying to say something about government dysfunction, the evil and corrupt nature of modern politics, and the mob anger and adoration that centers around our President, and the widening gap in income equality. We get it.

Here, the left and the right are sick of each other.  They are beyond argument. There is no good or normal person to hang onto in this world.

The Trumpian character in this movie is Thomas Wayne, the father of Bruce Wayne, a/k/a Batman, who is very young and about to be orphaned. In the movie, Bruce briefly meets his future nemesis.

Wayne senior is instantly familiar to us in 2019. He is running for mayor, and he wants to make Gotham City great again. The relevance of his arrogance and contempt for the poor is hard to miss.

In this story, the rich and the poor are equally evil and the populist hatred for the wealthy “elites” is yet another message for modern times. In the mob scenes that build throughout the movie, I had the distinct sense we were supposed to be thinking of those political rallies where people in red hats scream for blood and vengeance.

They are chilling in the movie too.

The rich-poor gap was not nearly as severe 20 years ago as it is now, this might explain the rage and hatred in the people of Gotham City.

Here, everybody hates everybody, and everyone is mean to our hero, who is prodded and provoked into becoming the monster we know he will be when he finally breaks.

Phillips seemed obsessed with 80’s movies, especially Taxi Driver and the King Of Comedy, two great movies from that era.  (I’ve read that there are also  elements of Death Wish, Network, The Empire Strikes Back and others).

There are all kinds of insider references to those and other movies. I couldn’t follow them all. It felt a bit obsessive to me, a lot of insider baseball.

In this movie, Phillips is actually trying to new ground. Why all the bowing and scraping and homage to the past? And I don’t get the relevance of Taxi  Driver, maybe I’m just dense.

Phillips even brought Robert DeNiro (the star of Taxi Driver) into the film as co-star, playing a late-night Johnny Carson kind of talk show host.

Phoenix is really astonishing in this movie, and we are reminded he’s a wonderful dancer too. His character- gaunt and lean in the film –  is over the top, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, and that is not an emotion one would ever feel for any of the Joker’s that preceded him.

The DC Comics Joker was never unhappy, he was gleefully malignant, he never felt sorry for himself.

One of the things I loved about the best “Jokers” is that they are all joyous villains, they loved being bad and busting Batman’s chops.  And they were clever, they often outmaneuvered the stolid, dull Batman.

They had a blast being evil. They never forget that they were clowns.

There is not a drop of joy or humor in this movie.

I might want to go see the movie again tomorrow because at times I saw the film as a masterpiece as did many of the critics, and at times I saw it as a hollow mess with a brilliant actor holding a tortured and circular storyline together.

I want to see if I can make up my mind. I owe it that, I think.

The film is a deep and penetrating study of extreme mental illness, a human bullied and tormented by everyone in his world.

That may be compelling to watch, even fascinating, but it wasn’t fun for me.

Arther Fleck (the Joker’s name) suffers from uncontrollable laughter that is either a neurological disorder or the result of childhood abuse.

We are also meant to understand the profound alienation in Gotham is caused by social inequality, the decline of civility, political corruption, cable news, paralyzed government bureaucracy and grotesque urban decay, usually associated with New York City in the ’70s and ’80s.

The media is very much a target here, and for good reason.

We definitely see the troubled state of our divided country mirrored in this film.  New York City is in much better shape than it was in the earlier Batman/Joker films, but the country isn’t.

What we don’t see here, if it matters,  is any kind of resolution or hope. It’s easy to capture disappointment and rage, but what are we supposed to take from that? Go home and throw ourselves into the river?

In the Joker’s world, as in our world today, the embrace of deception and radical evil becomes a kind of integrity, the new grievance, the new cool. That is an idea for me to think about when I read the news.

At times, I felt the movie’s narrative lost itself, too much laughing, too much insanity, too much blood. Arther Fletch wasn’t just disturbed, he was cuckoo.

I was restless at times for the story to get moving, perhaps I’m spoiled and used to the whiz-bang pace of the superhero/comic genre.  Seeing thousands of people blown away doesn’t seem to stick. Seeing one go to pieces or be hacked to death is tougher, at least for me.

But then I remember that this movie broke away from its own genre, perhaps even re-defining it. Lots of people really love it. That makes it worth seeing for me.

The Joker was created in 1940, and published and still owned by DC Comics. The character was created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane,  Jerry Robinson.

It was a brilliant stroke to take the clown and turn him into a criminal mastermind. That really got to children and kids, and into their imagination. It got into mine.

But if the character is pure evil,  a broken kind of monster, then what can we really take from it?

There is little of the comic book ethos in this movie, in fact, there was none.

There wasn’t a single explosion, and it wasn’t until nearly the end of the movie that the Joker came alive and revealed himself in his bright red suit and familiar mask. It was powerful – I got a chill –  but a bit late.

A.O. Scott my favorite movie critic, wrote in the New York Times that the movie is both weightless and shallow, and can’t be taken seriously. “Is that the joke?,” he wondered after the movie won first prize at the Venice Film Festival.

I’m not sure if that was the joke. But Scott’s comment got to me when I read it.

There was some truly amazing acting, cinematography, mystical beauty in the movie, it was riveting and repelling at the same time.  Sometimes graceful, sometimes wrenching. Once or twice, it was disgusting.

For those of you who are wondering, there is extreme violence and brutality in two or three scenes, I would not recommend it for children, this is not a rollicking, cartoonish superhero movie.  Not only do the good guys not win,  there are no good guys, not a one.

The violence is not romanticized or softened, it is very real and very disturbing.

Make no mistake, this is an unrelenting psycho-drama. We see Arthur Fletch get dumped by his therapist and deprived of his meds. He disintegrates bit by bit until he is finally destroyed and reborn as a nightmare.

So this is as far as I can go tonight. I’ll consider seeing the movie again tomorrow and see if the uncertainty clears up a bit for me. The movie sure did have an effect on me, that’s worth mentioning.

Anyone who loves movies as an art form should not hesitate to see it.  Phoenix is amazing. And this is a movie you will think about, and perhaps argue about, for a long time.

People who don’t like unadulterated darkness and blood and despair can skip it.