I must admit, I didn’t know what to do with Todd Phillips’s “Joker” at first. The polarizing supervillain drama, based on Batman’s greatest nemesis, dazzled many viewers with its epic photography, its righteous indignation at broken social systems, and Joaquin Phoenix’s eerie and fragile performance as Arthur Fleck. But beneath all that there was a frustrating lack of specificity about what it was actually angry at, and a distracting lack of originality, since it cribbed wholesale from several obvious sources — especially Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.”

It took some time but I finally found where I stand with “Joker,” and it’s halfway between the praise and the criticism. All the film’s fine qualities and all of its deficiencies are in a symbiotic relationship, and the derivativeness is their connective tissue. After all, “Joker” is the story of a failed...