I hardly ever go to movies. There was so much buzz about this Joker thing, that I went to see it.

Joker is a good movie. I recommend you see it, especially before you read this review which contains HUGE SPOILERS. After you see the movie, check back here to find out whether you saw the same movie I saw.

Spoiler: you probably didn’t. I’ve seen some online buzz about the movie; cracked.com published an article about 6 ways this movie is uninteresting; Ebert panned it; OregonMuse has a review over at Ace’s place. None of these reviewers saw the same movie I saw. They also didn’t see nearly as good a movie as I saw.

Superhero and action movies generally suck. They depict events in total defiance of logic, physics, human nature, common sense, good storytelling, and harmless fun. For all the lycra and exploding gasoline, it’s boring to watch stories that can’t happen about characters nobody can care about, especially when it’s ladled on with tendentious preaching.

Joker does not suffer from these glaring defects. The movie defies belief in subtler ways. But it turns out the very unrealism is a device to convey meaning. Joker makes unrealism work by viewing it through the mind of Arthur Fleck.

Arthur is a mess. He has a neurological defect which causes him to laugh uncontrollably whenever he experiences strong emotions. The emotions he experiences are mostly grief, rage and bewilderment. Joaquin Phoenix captures this plight in the opening scene of the movie: again and again, Arthur’s face contorts in grief, and just at the moment when a normal person would break down sobbing, he bursts out with a cracked, shaky laugh. You get the feeling he’d be much better off if he could only cry.

Arthur is in a downward spiral. He loses his job, the social services which he was depending on for counseling and medication shut down, he bombs his opener at the comedy club, and his mother has a stroke. To top it off, ordinary people treat him very badly. This helpless man seems to be a magnet for rudeness, hostility, even physical violence from random strangers. By mid-movie Fleck is broke, jobless, his ambitions shattered, his mother dying, and he is off his meds, whatever that means.

Turns out, being off his meds means a lot. Superficially this is a story about a broken man who starts to lash out violently against a world in which he has no place. Some have seen social commentary in the movie. But what the movie is really about is Fleck’s psychosis, the blurring of his inner and outer lives. This is revealed subtly at first, forcefully later.

The subtle reveal is in Arthur’s relationship with the woman down the hall. Played by Zazie Beetz, she is a very attractive young lady. She notices Arthur Fleck stalking her and confronts him. And then…she falls for him. At one point he barges into her apartment and makes love to her. When Arthur’s mother is hospitalized, the woman from down the hall is there with him, caressing his back as he waits by his mother’s deathbed.

And it all just feels a little off. Arthur Fleck is a gaunt, slope-shouldered, unhealthy, gray-toothed reject from society, complete with uncontrollable physical tics and zero social skills. It’s hard to believe he could even get a prostitute. Why would this young woman, who could turn the head of any man, take any interest in Arthur Fleck? He’s never said anything funny to her, so why would she think he’s funny? And why, if Arthur has this new and beautiful love in his life, does his mood not improve?

Ebert noticed this and seems to have chalked it up to lazy character development. Now, movies with no character development are boring and it’s natural to disengage. But this relationship is key to a devastating reveal, one that alters the entire concept of the film.

Because after Arthur’s mother dies, it turns out the woman down the hall doesn’t know him. She never said he was funny. He never made love to her. She wasn’t at the hospital with him. Arthur is off his meds. He’s living in delusion.

And so is the viewer. It makes this movie a very enjoyable head game. The narrator is unreliable. You have to figure out what to believe and what not to, and you notice that unreality was sprinkled into the movie from the beginning.

My own guess is that half or more of the major events in the movie don’t actually happen. Many of the most striking visuals turn out to be hallucinations. And I’m amazed to see smart people taking these parts of the movie at face value. The movie is very forceful on this point: do not believe what you see. There is makeup. There are masks. There are official lies. Things are not what they seem.

How forceful? After Arthur finds out he never had a girlfriend, he goes back to his apartment and starts calmly unloading the fridge. He takes everything out, even the shelves, and his body language shows he is sizing up the space inside. He means to get in the fridge! Why? Is he hot? Some kind of compulsion? But then he does get in the fridge, the door swings shut, and you can see it’s one of those old-style refrigerators with a positive latch that can’t be opened from the inside. Suicide. The second you realize it, the phone rings and Arthur gets out of bed to answer it.

The rest of the movie plays out in Arthur’s mind as he dies in that refrigerator. Get it? The only other alternative is that the refrigerator scene is just some kind of meaningless freak-out scene with no significance. A false memory of an image made to startle. No. That’s not what it is. In real life, Arthur never gets out of that fridge.

The content of Arthur’s delusions is all familiar stuff. Arthur takes bloody revenge on those who have wronged him. He becomes an important force in society, touching off a violent mass movement. He cleverly evades the police, luring them to their doom. He gets to be on a big TV show on his own terms. One of Arthur’s faithful followers guns down the evil Thomas Wayne. The mob cheers for Arthur Fleck as he dances on the hood of a wrecked police car. And all of it has that “off” quality. There is a consistent sense that this isn’t quite how the real world works.

I say this is familiar, because we all have this stuff in us. Everyone has fantasies of violence and grandiosity. Joker holds up the mirror to you, personally. The movie says, your inner life has stuff in it that is far more dark and dangerous than anything you’re likely to encounter in the outer world. Be glad you can keep it in. Be glad others can keep it in.

In the final scene, Arthur is institutionalized. It’s not clear how he got there. The setting, with its featureless white rectangular surfaces, resembles the interior of a refrigerator.

If the movie has a villain, it is Thomas Wayne. Thomas Wayne is Arthur Fleck’s biological father. Wayne knocked up Penny Fleck and then abandoned her. When she protested, Wayne physically abused her two-year-old son, leaving him with head trauma and this strange laughing condition. Wayne then had his fixers get Penny declared an unfit, insane, abusive mother, and had adoption paperwork forged for Arthur. When Arthur confronts Wayne as a grown man, Wayne brutally assaults him. When Arthur finds out the official story, he murders his mother, the only person he had ever cared for. Then he finds out Penny really was his mother and Wayne really is his father. You can see why Arthur would fantasize about killing the guy.

Or does he find out? That reveal is in the pure-delusional part of the movie. Tricky.

Thomas Wayne is a caricature of Donald Trump. Too bad about that, but it is interesting to see. The movie depicts class warfare, and it could be construed as an argument in favor of social services. But what the movie is really about is the madness of Arthur Fleck. Arthur has his reasons to resent a rich man; Arthur would benefit from social services. Arthur is the narrator of the movie. Any “social commentary” has to be from his perspective, which is to say the perspective of a madman. The movie seems to tacitly acknowledge this. You never get the sense you’re being preached to.

The only other political angle is the fact that the movie features Robert de Niro in a prominent role. De Niro has, of course, embarrassed everyone with his frequent, mindless, profane and very public attacks on President Donald Trump. But now I think maybe he was just pumping us up for the moment when his character gets his brains blown out on live TV. Of course it’s just a fantasy, but if de Niro has annoyed you in the past, you might find it satisfying. And if that really was de Niro’s intention all along, all I can say is: well played, Sir. Well played.

It’s a little confusing that Joker is associated with the DC Comics universe. It would have been just as good a movie if it was called “Arthur Fleck”. But then it wouldn’t have been the biggest-grossing R-rated movie in history. Joker is a poor supervillain origin story; the protagonist is mostly harmless, and then he kills himself. But it is an outstanding achievement to make a difficult movie like this, and make it go big. And if this means that the final showdown between Batman and the Joker is an inconclusive, drunken brawl between two crippled bums in a garbage-strewn alleyway, I’m okay with that. DC is dead to me. Marvel is dead to me. Star Wars is dead to me. Do whatever you want with the corpses.