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    Review: Joaquin Phoenix puts on quite a show in 'Joker.' And the portrait of madness is both bleak and glib

    by Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times Oct 04, 2019 6 minutes

    The best superhero origin stories draw their power from a strange, durable tension: an inevitable destination but an unpredictable journey. We know that Bruce Wayne will one day put on some hosiery and swoop past skyscrapers, but how he arrives there, as he did in Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" (2005), needn't be a foregone conclusion. The complications of his family life, the realization of the talents that set him apart, the embrace of a symbolically powerful alter ego: All these familiar beats can be orchestrated and synthesized in ways that will seem both recognizable and revelatory to a shrewd, pop-savvy audience.

    "Joker," Todd Phillips' sensationally grim new movie about the fall and rise of Batman's greatest nemesis, fulfills these conventions so that it can turn them violently inside out. With impressive skill and commitment, the director and his star, Joaquin Phoenix, reverse the moral logic of the origin story, replacing its sense of emergent order with

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