Recommended Re-Viewing is a series in which we make the case for re-watching an old film or TV series which you can stream without leaving your house. It might be a plot that's so bad it's good, a scene which deserves more interrogation or a director's underrated gem.

This time, Esquire writer Tom Nicholson champions Joaquin Phoenix's bizarrely underappreciated performance in Lynne Ramsay's hallucinatory thriller.

If Victor Frankenstein had set out to build a creature specifically to challenge for Academy Awards, he'd have had some tough decisions on his hands. Mahershala Ali's eyes, or Daniel Craig's? Do you grab a foot each from Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire? Do you pinch Paul Newman's eyebrows and forehead, or wait for Meryl Streep's to become available?

One bit of the creature would be sewn up, though. Joaquin Phoenix's back is, for my money, the most expressive back in all of cinema. There aren't many actors who a director can trust to communicate the whole point of a film using only their spine and their rhomboids, but Joaquin's the master.

But I'd not even noticed it was a motif in his career until I rewatched Lynne Ramsay's extraordinary, hushed hitman thriller You Were Never Really Here. A couple of shots really linger on Phoenix's assassin, Joe, as he faces away from the camera, shirtless. He's a big guy, carrying the figurative weight of his traumatic past – time spent in the army, then as a hired skull-smasher, who gets trafficked children out of lives of abuse mainly using hammers. He has scars, which are never explained. Ramsay doesn't need to.

You Were Never Really Here
Film4/BFI

Rewatching You Were Never Really Here for the first time since Joker came out, it immediately made me think of the scene in which Todd Phillips' camera looms behind Phoenix's Arthur Fleck as he stretches out his clown shoes, ribs straining beneath the skin.

Joker
Warner Bros

Now, Joe and Fleck might not look like the same man, but they're very similar. They're both ultraviolent, burnt-up loners who live in the margins having retreated from a society that appals them. They both have intense relationships with their mums. They both spend haunting moments alone in bathrooms. Both see their planes of consciousness slide into and out of each other. And, more than anything else, they're both vehicles for Phoenix's glowering magnetism, though Fleck is far showier.

It's not exactly the same performance, obviously – Joe doesn't do much high-kicking, for one thing – but You Were Never Really Here definitely feels like a dry run for Joker. No, not a dry run; that's not fair to Ramsay's film. You Were Never Really Here achieves everything that Joker didn't. Ramsay and Phillips both dig into Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Mean Streets for their tone and colour, especially when they want to paint the scuzzy underbelly of New York/Gotham.

But where Joker feels constricted by its reference points, Ramsay turns them into something contemporary and original. It's doesn't grandstand or over-explain itself. It's a thriller that works as a character piece, rather than being a virtuoso performance with some DC intellectual property bolted on.

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In an alternate, more just timeline, Joaquin won his Best Actor Oscar for You Were Never Really Here, and Ramsay went toe-to-toe with Guillermo del Toro and The Shape of Water for Best Director. As it was, You Were Never Really Here got completely ignored, and the inferior Joker made a billion dollars. If you don't laugh, you'll cry.

WATCH IT HERE

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