Examples are stacking up: Celebrities just don’t like us. Last year, Donald Glover enlisted his famous friends to make a gruesome TV show about a killer pop fan. This year, Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of 2024, called her most ardent admirers creepy. Now Joker: Folie à Deux offers a tedious lecture about the challenges of fame. Audience members may walk out feeling punished for the crime of wanting to be entertained by a comic-book-inspired movie-musical starring some of the most successful performers on Earth.
Todd Phillips’s 2019 smash, Joker, connected because it used the extraordinary trappings of the Batman universe to explore the plight of an unextraordinary person. Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck had a mental disorder that caused uncontrollable laughter and some rather involved delusions, but otherwise he was just a soft-spoken dude who kept getting stepped on by other people. Like many of us, he was both enamored with and resentful of the smiling stars he saw on TV. Eventually, Arthur painted his face, started calling himself Joker, and took vengeance on the culture, including by killing a celebrity on air. The fervency of acclaim that the movie spawned—$1 billion worldwide at the box office and a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars—suggested, somewhat chillingly, that the masses found catharsis in this tale.
In the sequel, Arthur is now famous for his crimes, and he finds fame to literally be that thing celebrities always say it is: a prison. Or rather, it’s a mental institution, staffed by abusive guards infected with the madness that comes with power and impunity. He meets another inmate-patient, Lady Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, who’s a huge fan of his. She says his murderous stunt made her feel, for the first time in her life, like she wasn’t alone. Arthur is smitten, or flattered, or both—maybe they’re the same feeling. When prosecutors announce that they’ll try him for the death penalty, his mind is still on Lee, and he breaks into a sweet, rasping tune: “For once in my life, I have someone who needs me.” The song he’s singing, made famous by Stevie Wonder, is one of many 20th-century classics Arthur and Lee will perform, moving back and forth between colorful dreamspace and bleak reality.
The ensuing courtroom drama investigates a philosophical question: What’s the difference between a person and a persona? Arthur’s attorney pursues an insanity defense, positing that Arthur has a split personality and that Joker is another entity that lives inside his head. Lee encourages Arthur to embrace his villainous side; she even insists on painting his face with clown makeup before they have sex. The movie clearly argues, however, that the Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit invoked by Arthur’s advocates is a dangerous fantasy. The belief that he sometimes transforms into a braver, wilder creature—thereby excusing his sins—inspires his followers to don masks and cause havoc. He eventually disavows the notion that he and Joker are separate, but it’s too late: The myth has gone viral, and Arthur himself could become one of its victims.
This is a pretty strange angle on fame. Lots of celebs who adopt stage names insist that they’re basically two different people; Roan, for example, calls herself a drag queen and says that snooping fans violate a boundary she intentionally set between her public and private selves. Gaga, however, has long tried to resist the idea of a bifurcated identity. The brilliance of her early-career self was that she was all surface, all meat dress. About a decade ago, somewhere between her albums Artpop and Joanne, she flipped the routine and started acting earnest in public. “There was a time in my career when I … spoke in an accent in interviews or told lies, but I was performing,” she recently told Vogue. “Now it’s a much more palatable mixture of authenticity and imagination.” This new approach is apt for an era in which internet-enabled confusion has created a hunger for realness. Performance is always artificial, but stars, more than ever, need us to believe they’re not BSing. Joker: Folie à Deux critiques the impulse to figure out who our idols really are—not because that quest is impossible or even because it’s invasive, but simply because it’s not that deep. An evil clown is an evil clown.
Whatever one might think of that idea, Joker: Folie à Deux has all the ingredients to make for a lively, goth-chic bit of metacommentary. Phillips renders the asylum as a convincingly tactile, gray-brown fortress. He selects golden-era-Hollywood musical numbers whose cheerfulness has a poisoned edge, such as “That’s Entertainment!,” a sing-along, from Fred Astaire’s 1953 film, The Band Wagon, about the public’s thirst for big-screen mayhem. But something’s amiss. Folie à Deux is both overlong and empty, padded out with copious shots of characters walking down hallways or staring out of car windows. The romantic storyline develops too quickly, mostly off-screen, and then just stagnates. Themes get stated and restated in didactic, circular dialogue. I liked one performance, “Gonna Build a Mountain,” set in a nightclub where Gaga pounds the piano and Phoenix tap-dances. But otherwise, the musical performances are underpowered, lacking much movement, personality, or surprise.
In fact, the film’s problems are so glaring that one can’t help but wonder about what happened behind the scenes. Phoenix has a reputation for prickliness on set. Gaga had some strong moments in A Star Is Born, but as an actor, her main asset is a hard-set pout that’s best suited for generating campy reaction memes. The two have no chemistry on-screen, and the movie feels as though it’s been edited to minimize their interactions. But—there I go, acting like the leering, demanding celebrity-obsessives who are Folie à Deux’s true villains. Hollywood has trained us to look past the facades of what it sells us, to seek the story behind the story. But it resents us for wanting more razzle-dazzle than the stars are always willing or able to give.