A murderous psychopath mournfully sings his heart out in jail. A family living in a below-ground bunker chorus together about the end of the world. A lawyer belts out a number about gender re-assignment surgery. Welcome to the movie musical 2024 – a period, it seems, of radical reinvention for the genre. Never mind the ebullient nature of High Society and other Hollywood golden age musicals, film-makers are now turning to all-singin’, all-dancin’ spectaculars to express something much darker.
In Joker: Folie à Deux, the leftfield sequel to 2019’s Joker, Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga sing old standards such as Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and That’s Entertainment! and, in some ways, turning this gloomy DC Comics-inspired take on Batman’s nemesis into a musical has a skewed logic. Think back to its predecessor and Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, in full Joker regalia, dancing his way down those steps near New York’s 167th Street Station to the anthemic stomp of Gary Glitter’s Rock’n’Roll (Part 2).
