Joker: Folie à Deux: this all-singing sequel tapdances on the trolls

He’s wild again. Beguiled again. A simpering, whimpering, abused and traumatised (man)child again. But in Todd Phillips’s sequel to his 2019 blockbuster, Arthur Fleck aka Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) is not what he was before, which might be a problem for the first film’s diehard stans. Then again, it might come as a relief to those of us who liked Joker in a grubby, complicated way that didn’t make us feel great about ourselves. Joker: Folie à Deux is a far less morally quarrelsome film, which makes it both less interesting and a sight more enjoyable – if you like the songs. Which you should. These are great songs, knitted into the troubled ebbs and swells of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s excellent score with a consistency of tone unusual in a jukebox musical.

The inarguable main attraction, however, is Joaquin Phoenix’s level of commitment, which might not have the shock of the new any more, but is still as mesmerising a portrayal of a gnarled and stunted psyche as we’ve recently seen. His physical emaciation is such that where last time his clavicles looked like they were clawing through his skin to strangle him, this time Lawrence Sher’s queasy camera is transfixed by shoulderblades that protrude so far on either side of a scoliotic spine they could be the wing-stumps of a fallen angel. Shuffling in a sedated daze through the corridors of Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial, whatever spirit (whatever Jokeriness) Arthur had in him when he was committed has been broken by the joylessness of incarceration and the hectoring of the guards, led by Brendan Gleeson’s nasty bit of work. “Got a joke for us, Arthur?” is his endless refrain. Arthur never does.

But one afternoon on his way to talk to his attorney, Maryanne (Catherine Keener, almost parodically perfect casting for a bleeding-heart liberal lawyer who insists Arthur’s Joker-shaped illness, not Arthur himself, is to blame for the murders), Arthur spots Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel (Lady Gaga on a low flame) participating in a music therapy class. Their slow-mo moment of connection echoes his delusional fixation on Zazie Beetz’s Sophie in the first film, with the difference that here, per the title, it’s a delusion shared. Lee had herself committed in order to meet her idol, Joker, thus continuing the cycle of celebrity-stalker/killer becoming a celebrity in turn and inspiring his own unhealthily fixated following.

In elaborate fantasies, Arthur-as-Joker romances Lee by rifling through the Great American Songbook in lavishly staged musical numbers homaging Fred and Ginger, Judy Garland, nightclub cabaret acts and Sonny and Cher’s 1970s TV variety shows, complete with awkwardly self-aware banter. But though these sequences represent a rupture from reality, care is taken to make the transitions seamless, as when Lee serenades Arthur with the Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ after the song’s central motif has already been rippling through Guðnadóttir’s score for some time. From the outside, Arthur’s behaviour might be disordered, but to him, it’s all a continuum.

Joker arrived after almost four wearying years of Trump when it felt like everyday US discourse was livid with malign energy and incipient violence. Now, at the tail end of Biden’s presidency, the temperature is lower. It’s a complacency reflected in a sequel in which very little actually happens and where, aside from an incident that may leave DA Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) with some narratively useful injuries, there are refreshingly few obvious attempts to make the story mesh with Batman/DC lore. Unlike Joker, Folie à Deux doesn’t savagely self-cannibalise so much as it sedately gnaws at its fingernails.

Indeed, this film’s trajectory is either incredibly brave (and subversively counter-subversive) in selling the core Joker fanbase up the Swanee, or just really dumb in neutering the previous movie’s up-in-your-grill appeal. Either way, it’s a choice that Phillips is not making unwittingly, even if his long game remains unclear. Is he addressing the first film’s toxicity in order to lay it to rest, or to set up a third movie (Joker: Ménage à Trois, anyone?) in which it will come roaring back tenfold? Once again, there’s the feeling he gets to have all the cake and eat all the cake, only here it might be because nobody much wants this cake. Except those of us who just really dig the music. The devil always did have all the best tunes.

► Joker: Folie à Deux arrives in UK cinemas 4 October.