The Only Recap You Need Before Joker: Folie à Deux

It may be tough to remember now — we’ve all lived so many lives since then! — but when “Joker” was released in 2019, the film sparked concerns that it could lead to violence. Director Todd Phillips questioned the backlash, comparing his film to “John Wick” and telling the Associated Press, “Why does this movie get held to different standards? It honestly doesn’t make sense to me.” The film, after all, was about a white man committing extreme violence because he felt shafted by society, and in the thick of the Donald Trump administration, it felt like Joker could prove to be a hero to a certain subsection of the population.

“Joker” didn’t, of course, lead to mass outbreaks of comic book clown-inspired movie theater violence. The movie went on to break a billion dollars, and it won two Oscars out of eleven nominations: one for Joaquin Phoenix’s lead performance and one for Hildur Guðnadóttir’s fantastic score. Now, there’s a sequel on the horizon. “Joker: Folie à Deux” hits theaters on October 4, 2024, continuing the misadventures of the clown named Arthur Fleck. This time, it’s a musical, and it’s even got a little “Looney Tunes” in its blood. 

But what was “Joker” really even about, anyway? If it’s been a while since you’ve seen the film — again, we’ve all been distracted these last few years! — then have no fear, we’ve got the only recap you need before “Joker: Folie à Deux” right here.

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been enjoying a decade and a half of carefully-planned, interconnected storytelling, things have been a bit more scattershot over at DC. Director James Gunn is stepping in to clean things up with a whole new direction, but in just the past few years, we’ve had multiple Batman continuities happening at once. That’s not to even mention the way “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” breaks several other films in the process.

Anyway, when “Joker” debuted in 2019, some fans may naturally have expected the film to center around Jared Leto’s conception of the character; after all, he’d just played the Joker in “Suicide Squad.” This solo film, however, exists in its own continuity, separate from all of the various other DC Universes happening at any given time. This version of the Joker isn’t just different than Leto’s portrayal; it’s essentially a brand-new character, showing off a discrete personality and different motivations than other portrayals. He’s nothing like Heath Ledger’s version from “The Dark Knight,” and he’s definitely nothing like Jack Nicholson’s iconic interpretation in Tim Burton’s “Batman.”

No, this Joker is all Joaquin Phoenix, a collection of character traits and quirks brought to life in a performance that seems to be causing the actor physical pain. The entirely-fresh approach paid off, winning Phoenix the Oscar.

Arthur Fleck is a sad man. When “Joker” opens, he’s a rent-a-clown, working for an agency that lets people hire facepainted funnymen for various jobs. When he’s hired to spin a sign outside a storefront, a bunch of kids jump him and steal his sign, beating him up and breaking it. This puts his job in jeopardy right from the beginning of the film.

Arthur also has a condition: he laughs a lot. Uncontrollably. Creepily. He carries a laminated card to hand to people in case he disturbs someone in public, letting them know, “It can happen to people with a brain injury or certain neurological conditions.” We don’t know which Arthur has, but we do know he had quite a troubled childhood, including being abused by his mother’s boyfriend. He still lives with his mother Penny (Frances Conroy), in fact, caring for her as she slips into delusions.

Though Arthur works as a clown, he has other aspirations. Namely, he wants to be a comedian. Arthur loves “Live with Murray Franklin,” a late-night talk show, and in an attempt to kickstart his comedy career, he participates in a stand-up comedy open mic session. He bombs horribly, unable to stop himself from laughing before he can even get a punchline out.

After Arthur gets jumped on the job, a coworker gives him a gun. He brings it to his next gig, which is, unfortunately, entertaining a bunch of sick children in a cancer word. Understandably, this gets him fired from his clowning job, setting off a series of events that culminate in Arthur donning the persona of “Joker.”

First, after witnessing three Wall Street bros harassing a woman on the subway, Arthur guns them all down. This sends Gotham into a spiral of clown-related panic, as the murders become a cultural symbol for the working class revolting against the rich. Next, Arthur’s mother falls ill, and he learns that she’s been lying to him most of his life. She’s apparently quite delusional, having been locked up at Arkham Asylum, and Arthur also learns that he was adopted. So he kills his mother, too.

Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) mocks Arthur on his show. Someone took video of him bombing his stand-up set, apparently, and he becomes a laughingstock. Murray calls him a “joker” on television, and Arthur decides to adopt the persona. By the time Murray invites him to appear on the show, Arthur asks to be introduced as “Joker,” painting his face for the appearance, even though he’s warned that tensions in Gotham are high, and there’s a chance his look could set off more violence. Violence, it turns out, is just what Joker has planned.

When “Joker” was released in 2019, many critics noted the film’s similarities to the work of Martin Scorsese. Our own /Film review of the “Joker”  made comparisons to “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy,” and both films can prove instructive in untangling the film’s many influences.

First, we have “Taxi Driver,” Scorsese’s masterpiece centering around a cabbie named Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a man who grows increasingly alienated and nihilistic as the film goes on. “He’s a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he’s alive,” the tagline went, and as /Film’s Chris Evangelista noted, the same could apply to Arthur Fleck in “Joker.” After all, when he finally sits down with Murray Franklin and gets to tell a joke, he asks, “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?”

Then there’s “The King of Comedy,” another De Niro collaboration. That one was about a man (also played by De Niro) who becomes obsessed with a comedian (Jerry Lewis), deciding to commit an act of violence as a way to launch his own career to the next level. This time, in “Joker,” De Niro plays the object of the obsessive fan’s attention, and he’s also the object of his violence. After that set-up, Joker gets to the punchline: “You get what you f***ing deserve.” He pulls out his gun and shoots Murray in the head, live on television.

But wait, why didn’t Batman stop Joker from sending the city spiraling into chaos? Easy answer: in this version, Batman’s still a kid. He’s a very young Bruce Wayne, and furthermore, his parents are still alive. There’s also a subplot running through “Joker” about Arthur’s increasing obsession with Thomas Wayne, the father of the kid who would someday grow up to don the cape. Arthur’s mother Penny used to work for Wayne, and Arthur learns that she’s been sending him letters claiming that Arthur is his son. Desperate to draw the attention of the man he now believes to be his father, Arthur travels to Wayne Manor and puts on a little magic show for Bruce, entertaining him from outside the gate.

Batman and Joker are, iconically, sworn enemies. The idea that they might be brothers is a new one, adding a twist to their typical oppositions — Batman usually represents order and the Joker, chaos, etc. However, after Arthur confronts Wayne in the bathroom during a fundraiser, he learns that he was adopted, and there’s no way Wayne could’ve been his father.

It might’ve been refreshing for “Joker” to give us a depiction of Bruce Wayne as a child without going through the typical origin-story setup, but we get it anyway. During the Joker Riots at the end, we see the Wayne family cornered in an alley. They’re killed, and of course, those pearls go flying as young Bruce looks on, horrified.

After Arthur shoots Franklin Murray on live television, he’s quickly arrested. However, his appearance has touched off riots around the city, and now, “Gotham is burning.” Arthur watches the chaos outside the cop car window with glee. When the car crashes and a bunch of rioting clowns carry him from the wreckage, he climbs atop a car and dances to the adoration of his fans.

Then we cut to Arthur, institutionalized, speaking with a therapist inside the gleaming white walls of the asylum. The film doesn’t spell out exactly how he was locked up, but it’s easy enough to piece together; after all, he killed a man on live television, and the show’s bookers knew his name. He admitted to having killed those three men on the subway, meaning it was likely easy enough for Gotham PD to pick him up after the rioting calmed down.

We should also keep in mind the fact that this isn’t Arthur’s first time being locked up at Arkham Asylum. Earlier in the film, speaking with his social worker, Arthur makes reference to having been hospitalized, though he declines to say what happened that led to his institutionalization. By the time much of the action in “Joker: Folie à Deux” centers around Arkham, the character will be quite familiar with the way the mental hospital runs.

The first “Joker” ended on a sort of cliffhanger. The very last image we have of Arthur Fleck is a shot of the laughing man walking away from the camera and down a white hallway, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind him. Did he just kill his therapist? Is this an escape attempt? It seems that “Joker: Folie à Deux” will avoid the immediate aftermath of that final scene, instead jumping ahead two years.

This is a smart choice, because it lets the sequel explore its own world without being tied too directly to the events of the first film. “The question became, ‘how can we top ourselves?’ And you can only do that if you do something dangerous,” director Todd Phillips told Variety. “But there were days on set where you’d look around and think, ‘Holy f***ing s***! What did we do?'”

Phillips said the time jump also let them dodge the expected results of the end of “Joker.” “We didn’t want to have him as the clown prince of crime or running a syndicate of criminals,” he said. Instead, the film centers around the Joker on trial, combining a romance with a courtroom drama. As Phillips told Variety, “Why do something if it doesn’t scare the s*** out of you? I’m addicted to risk.”

Recently, Hollywood’s been hit with a slate of musicals that seem ashamed of being musicals. For example, the “Wicked” trailer seems to be hiding the fact that it’s a musical. Other recent offenders include “The Color Purple,” “Wonka,” and the “Mean Girls” remake, all of which had trailers that seemed to conspicuously omit their musical-ness.

Then there’s the trailer for “Joker: Folie à Deux.” While it doesn’t necessarily feature full-on musical numbers, it’s clear that there’s something happening here. In addition to a shot that looks like a reference to “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” we see Harley Quinn and the Joker in several scenes that seem like they might be fantasy sequences — dancing across a gorgeous rooftop set and performing on what might be a TV set. Sure enough, Variety reported in March 2024 that the film would feature at least 15 covers of well-known songs, making it a jukebox musical.

Director Todd Phillips doesn’t like that. Speaking with Variety, he insisted that his film does things differently than other musicals. “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead,” Phillips said, even though that’s exactly how musical numbers function in the vast majority of musicals! Thankfully, in the same piece, Lady Gaga promised, “There’s music, there’s dance, it’s a drama, it’s also a courtroom drama, it’s a comedy, it’s happy, it’s sad.”

In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Lady Gaga will play the Joker’s love interest, Harley Quinn. Dr. Harleen Quinzel often starts out as a therapist at Arkham Asylum, but she falls in love with the Joker, and the association drives her mad. Just as “Joker” offered us a brand-new Joker, “Joker: Folie à Deux” promises a new take on the character that’s quite different from Margot Robbie’s DC Extended Universe portrayal. Robbie supports her successor, for the record. “It makes me so happy, because I said from the very beginning that all I want is for Harley Quinn to be one of those characters the way … like Macbeth or Batman always gets passed from great actor to great actor,” she said.

Ahead of the release of the film, director Todd Phillips gave fans a preview of what we can expect from this new characterization. Speaking to Variety, Phillips teased, “The high voice, that accent, the gum-chewing and all that sort of sassy stuff that’s in the comics, we stripped that away. We wanted her to fit into this world of Gotham that we created from the first movie.”

Gaga is a popstar in real life, and she played one on screen in “A Star is Born,” so Gaga endeavored to make sure Harley’s singing voice stands out by not sounding professional. “It’s like removing the technicality of the whole thing, removing my perceived art-form from it all and completely being inside of who she is,” she told Empire.

The iconic Batman villain Two-Face and his civilian alter ego Harvey Dent have been portrayed on screen several times already. Most recently, Aaron Eckhart brought Dent to life in “The Dark Knight.” The character is a district attorney who suffers a severe accident, becoming disfigured on exactly half of his body; this, of course, leads him down a path of villainy.

No official announcements have been made about Harvey Dent’s presence in “Joker: Folie à Deux,” but we can safely assume he’ll appear. In March 2023, as filming took place in New York City, enterprising fans snapped set photos. Pics of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn went viral all over the internet, and fans witnessed Harley climbing some crowded courthouse steps. But check this out: in set photos shared on Twitter by an account called @HollywoodHandle, one of the protesters is holding a sign that says, “Harvey Dent is the Clown.”

Taken on its own, that could just be an Easter egg. The “Joker: Folie à Deux” trailer, however, gives us another clue. YouTube may have spoiled Dent’s inclusion in the film, because if you turn on the closed captions, the trailer credits a line of dialogue to Dent: “They believe Arthur Fleck to be some kind of martyr. Well, he’s not. He’s a monster.” The trailer also features television footage of what is labeled the “Arthur Fleck Trial,” so taken altogether, we can deduce that Dent may be prosecuting Fleck’s various crimes.

We’ll find out how it all unfolds when “Joker: Folie à Deux” hits theaters this fall.