What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.

Joaquin Phoenix, in another outstanding performance.

Not only an intelligent throwback to the feel-bad shock cinema of the 1970s, Joker is all but unique in its social realism...

So much of the film doesn’t gel as it tries to link meaning through its influences. It’s not counter cultural in the way the films of the 1970s that it draws from were.