Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning role as the Joker in The Dark Knight was special. It helped bring the superhero genre into the visceral, the real. It was powerful in a way rarely experienced — you simply stopped breathing when he was on screen. The air was sucked out of the theater and all that was left was him.

Even though Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies created new standards for superhero realism, they still took place in a comic book universe. And so no matter how avant-garde Ledger’s performance may have been he was still operating in the realm of fantasy, with elaborate evil plans and, despite his rag-tag look, some quirky stylish swag.

Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is different. Different in kind. While Ledger allowed you to imagine what must have happened to him; Phoenix forces you to witness it.

Benefiting from being a film that doesn’t yet have to be a superhero movie, the story here is Arthur. We don’t have to concern ourselves with anything other than that, and so it’s him that we see. Not some maniacal cartoon terrorizing Gotham, but a man who cares for his sick mother, tries to make kids smile, and suffers alone from some painful mental illness. That’s all this is, and all it should be.

Niko Tavernise © 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Because committing evil is not pretty. Those who would take that step and burn the world with bare hands do not do it with style or one-liners. It is a lonely existence, absent of anything glorious. The road to such action must be ugly. And sad. Like the scenes of Arthur alone in his dark apartment, sitting on his couch, crying in his ratty underwear. Crying like some of us maybe have cried.

Arthur’s pain burns and rips out from the inside and it will not stop. It just won’t fucking stop. He has no peace. It tears at him; literally deforms him. His body begins to morph into his suffering. Even his attempt to dance, to feel finally free, is pained and stunted.

His spastic laugh dominates the soundtrack. Coughing and heaving, Arthur’s lungs gasp from lack of control. The smile often begins as a frown, birthed by some wrong, some unbearable experience; but either due to his neurological condition or his creeping villainy — or in some failing attempt to remain “normal” — the corners of his mouth betray the swelling sadness and his face transforms into hysterical cackle. The difference between the two states disappears.

There’s been some talk of the film’s potential association of mental illness and violence, a valid concern considering how often this lazy stereotype is used. But the focus here, for me, is Arthur, and how the portrayal of his suffering left me haunted for days. Any future violence inherent in the telling of the Joker’s story seems secondary, an obligatory inclusion.

Others have complained that the film relies too heavily on Phoenix’s performance, that the weight of some scenes leaves the audience in discomfort. But that’s the point and perhaps what gives the film its significance — this is it, this is what it’s like to suffer. It shouldn’t be comfortable to witness someone’s mental torment.

At a minimum, this is the superhero genre’s most realistic portrayal of human suffering. And it could, perhaps, also be one of Hollywood’s most compelling presentations of the tortures of the human mind, period.

I walked home from seeing Joker in a haze of emotion, switching between passionate punditry and solemn quiet. At one point my companion and I stopped on the sidewalk as I tried to finish a thought, to put a flourish on some grand summary of Phoenix’s performance. But nothing came out. I was caught, stuck in an emotive loop. On one side, Arthur’s seething pain, his clear provenance in the land of the not well; on the other, me, supposedly healthy, yet still having experienced some exact versions of his suffering.

We stood there for a while, quiet, the air getting slowly thick with silence and building emotion, both of us with the shimmerings of tears in our eyes.

So for the purposes of this review, I’ll dismiss everything but Arthur. I’ll ignore the film’s secondary themes of capitalism and its inequalities, of how America’s callousness fosters neglect and pressures the most vulnerable. I’ll overlook some of the movie’s shortcomings, its clunky dialogue and angsty declarations. Because even that somehow fits. Because when you’re a normal guy and not a caricature, when there is no script and you’re feeling seriously fucked up — well, you become pretty unconcerned with aesthetics.

Instead I’ll think about the long, discomforting scenes where Arthur laughed and cried his pain, and how I sat there in the theater, frozen, hand floating somewhere near my mouth. I’ll remember that this film made me both witness the ravages of mental illness and recognize my own experiences in them, melting the walls between definitions.

If that’s not an example of what art is supposed to do for us, I don’t know what is.