The forthcoming Deadpool 3 marks the first film in the franchise that will be produced after Disney bought 20th Century Fox. Fans have expressed concern that the R-rated Merc with a Mouth might become just another kid-friendly jokester under the new ownership. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick eased those fears in a recent interview with Den of Geek.

“Deadpool is gonna be Deadpool,” said Wernick.

The duo, who wrote the first two installments, was not initially aboard for the third go-round. But they were brought on after Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin penned a previous draft. And they’re enthusiastic about being back — and also about having the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to play with.

“It’s a thrill,” Reese said about the merger of Marvel properties previously held separately by the two studios. “It’s an absolute thrill to have the band back together, to have a new backdrop in the MCU with new characters, new villains, that kind of thing. You know, it’s never a marriage we necessarily saw coming, Fox and Disney, that was an external thing [apart] from our storytelling process. But we’re absolutely finding the serendipity and the gold in that situation, or we’re trying to.”

What about their habit of making fun of other Marvel franchises and/or pushing the envelope of superhero humor while under the watchful eye of the Mouse House’s brand shepherds?

“Don’t worry about that,” said Reese. “They’ve been very supportive with regard to that. Now when it comes to a particular joke, if we cross a line, maybe we’ll hear at some point, ‘Maybe not that joke.’ But I think they’ve been incredibly supportive of what we’re doing, because obviously we were doing it separate from them for a long time, and I think they’ve seen the success and they’ve had their own even greater success. So hopefully it’ll be a marriage made in heaven. But we’ve definitely got their support, and that’s a great thing to feel.”

“Funny Pages,” a scruffy, grungy, likably tossed-together sketchbook of a low-budget indie comedy, typifies a paradox that now runs through a great deal of independent cinema. The movie, set in a humdrum New Jersey suburbia, unfolds on the moldy bottom rung of the comic-book ladder. It centers on two friends who are obsessed with drawing their own comics, and it’s about the insular world of geeks and creeps and pervs and weirdos that this brings them into contact with.

Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), at 17, has left the posh home of his parents in Princeton and set up residence in downscale Trenton, where he hangs out at the local comic-book store along with his friend, the sweetly passive, long-haired, acne-ridden Miles (Miles Emanuel), who has a secret crush on him. These two eat, breathe, and sleep comic books. But they’re not into superheroes. To them the comic-book world is all about bringing reality to the page. They’re fixated on artists who work in the tradition of R. Crumb, like Daniel Clowes and Harvey Pekar and Peter Bagge. The everyday situations those artists create on the page are intensely relatable, making their comic books the opposite of fantasy.

That’s appealing on its own terms (it’s part of what makes Crumb the greatest artist ever to have worked in the comic-book medium). But hooked into that appeal is a certain DIY factor. You look at comics like Harvey Pekar’s and think, “Maybe I could actually do something like that.” (It’s the same struck-by-lightning feeling that Martin Scorsese got when he saw John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” — the revelation that he, too, could just go out into the New York streets and shoot a movie.)

Trying to capture life raw, as opposed to drawing some rainy sci-fi dystopia featuring horned demigods, is what a certain comic-book impulse is all about, an impulse that’s more connected to Charles Bukowski (or even Dostoevsky) than to the further adventures of men in capes. And you’d think “Funny Pages,” in peering into the lives of these kinds of devotees, would itself be rooted in a certain scuzzball reality principle. In a way it is. The film’s lighting is plain and glarey, and the settings are skeevy — like the basement apartment where Robert’s cohorts masturbate to Tijuana bibles (those pre-underground pornographic knockoffs of famous comic strips that show, for instance, Betty boffing Jughead), or the comic-book store that, in a few promising early scenes, looks like the setting for a “High Fidelity” of vérité comics. “Funny Pages” was produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, who as filmmakers (“Uncut Gems”) have made a certain gutter grunge quality their calling card, and the movie has an uncut Safdie flavor.

What is doesn’t have, oddly, is any sort of bone-deep reality factor. Almost nothing that happens in “Funny Pages” is particularly believable. The movie opens with Robert hanging out with his high-school art teacher, Mr. Katano (Stephen Adly Guigis), who insists on posing naked for him in order to illustrate a lesson about life drawing. This seems an extreme enough note to kick off a movie on, but to top it off, Mr. Katano races after Robert to apologize — and gets killed in a car accident. Now we’re off and running into whatever-happens-happens-ville.

Owen Kline, the writer and director of “Funny Pages,” has been an actor (he played Jesse Eisenberg’s little brother in “The Squid and the Whale”); he is also the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. In this, his debut as a filmmaker, he writes some acidly funny exchanges, and his affection for freaks and losers — and for the twisted purity of comic-book bohemians — is palpable. Yet watching “Funny Pages,” you can’t help but wonder whether the fact that this film was made by the child of two celebrities is linked in some way to how nonchalant the movie is, in its storytelling, about flouting basic rules of common sense.

Robert goes to work in the office of a public defender (Marcia Debonis), and that’s where he meets Wallace (Matthew Maher), a screw-loose cannon who once worked for the fabled Image Comics. He was just a color separator, but to Robert, who wants to break into the game, that makes him a god — or, at least, someone who once stood next to gods, or separated their colors. Robert latches onto Wallace, even though the man seems like a sub-incel, a seething lunatic. It only adds to the incongruity that Daniel Zolghadri, the engaging actor who plays Robert, is good-looking enough to come off less like a fervid comics nerd than like the Adrian Grenier of this group.

Wallace was arrested for a brawl at the local pharmacy, and the only thing on his mind is going back to the pharmacy to get his revenge. If you ask him about comic books, he’ll mostly scowl and gnash his teeth. Matthew Maher can be a mesmerizing actor, but the way he has been directed there’s no hidden romance to the character, nothing that would draw us in. He and Robert do go back to the pharmacy (for a scene that seems torn out of a bad ’80s comedy), and then Robert takes Wallace over to his family’s house on Christmas morning. Why would he do this? It’s supposed to speak to how alienated he is from his folks (who are played, rather likably, by Josh Pais and Maria Dizzia), but that’s the kind of kneejerk anti-suburban ‘tude that’s been faking up indie movies since “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

There are moments when “Funny Pages” recalls certain grunge-indie landmarks, like the early transgressive Todd Solondz films or Ronald Bronstein’s fearless “Frownland” (2007), a study in loserdom that never shrinks from reality. (Bronstein is one of the producers here.) But Robert’s fixation on Wallace, the cracked relic who never was, is just a conceit we have to roll with (even though it’s the heart of the film). “Funny Pages” wants to be about comic-book love, and at times it is, but the movie is working so hard to be disreputable that it lets the love get steamrolled.

John Cameron Mitchell is a multihyphenate who has worked onstage and on screen, as an actor, writer and director. Best known for co-writing and starring in the genderqueer rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch — first off-Broadway, then in the 2001 film adaptation and later a Tony-winning Broadway revival — Mitchell is one of the most prolific and beloved queer artists of their generation. This year, Mitchell donned a mullet and copious amounts of eyeliner to play the infamous Joe Exotic in Peacock’s limited series Joe vs. Carole, opposite Kate McKinnon as Joe’s nemesis, Carole Baskin. Mitchell sat down with THR to discuss their approach to the over-the-top character and finding the human underneath the bravado.

I’ve read that you said you hadn’t seen Netflix’s Tiger King. Were you aware of Joe Exotic’s story?

Yeah, vaguely. For my audition, I didn’t want to do an impersonation, because I think that’s, like, karaoke or something. Both Kate and I were probably 50 percent the real person and 50 percent our interpretation, which loosens you up for the more emotional scenes. We don’t know what he’s like privately. I also knew that he would change his accent and his voice depending on who he’s talking to. A lot of that was left to the imagination. I didn’t really talk to [anyone who knew Joe], but I watched a lot of his videos to let it seep in. A lot of it was just letting it happen naturally, the way you hang out with your uncle and start doing your uncle.

Is that your typical process?

I’m not an impersonation person, but it’s fun to find that thing. I moved around a lot as a kid, so I changed my accent a lot. I got used to that. I grew up where he grew up — Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas. And we [were born] within six weeks of each other. I know where he was, what music he was listening to. I was also a gay kid, not on a farm like he was, but the guys I had crushes on were.

He’s outside the mainstream, which you’ve been interested in exploring in the work you’ve written yourself. Was that an appeal?

Definitely. I like playing all kinds of characters, but it has been more queer lately. And I can relate [a bit to him], being a bit of an impresario myself with different types of projects, bringing people together — in his case, lording over them sometimes, while for me it’s hopefully more benevolent. His primal wounds were never healed, so he started attaching them to Carole and she did the same to him. They mistook each other for the people who hurt them in the past.

Considering their long feud, it’s crazy that they actually didn’t meet in real life very often.

They could have been friends if they had figured some stuff out, but she decided that these owners, who are mostly male, were taking advantage of the cats, and she wasn’t right. He found her hypocritical and she was equating him, probably, with a lot of the men who beat her. Which was not him. Of course, he fucked up more, because he tried to kill her. It’s hard to relate to that. But I can relate to other things. I lost a boyfriend to addiction; he lost two husbands. I could draw on that stuff for sure. And maybe he imitated his oppressor in one way and outdid them. He was a drag king as much as Hedwig was a drag queen.

How much does the costume and the hair and makeup add to your performance?

I found my audition mullet on Amazon — within 24 hours [of Tiger King‘s premiere] there was a Joe Exotic mullet available everywhere. I had these jeans from someone in London that zipped down the back. I flashed my asshole in the audition. Showrunners can be a bit conservative. I was like, “Come on, we can do this.” We’ve seen some penises [on TV] now, but [we draw the line at] the asshole.

As someone who is also a director, is it hard to resist the impulse to direct when you’re there strictly as an actor?

A little bit. We did have this ritual where before every scene I would go to [the writers] with ideas — often cutting stuff or punching up a joke. In the last episode, there’s a big scene where Joe has a fantasy speech to the audience, and [showrunner Etan Frankel] let me rewrite it, block it, design it in kind of a Broadway way. TV filmmakers don’t always edit themselves; they’re focusing more on the reality of it, not the big picture. And that is something that I’m always aware of. But I really enjoyed my directors, who really kept urging me to go crazy. I was always trying to be respectful and give the showrunner what he wanted, but also give him what he needed.

Joe was not thrilled about you being cast as him in the show.

He tweeted something when he saw a picture of me [in costume]: “He makes me look like a flaming faggot, when I’m just a hardworking gay man.” I did enjoy that. Femininity is a great demerit in the queer world of that time and place. It was unfortunate, because for all his pride, he’s really struggling with self-love.

While queerness isn’t the central focus of this show, it is a focus. How has queer storytelling changed over the course of your career?

None of the makers of this show were queer, but Kate and I brought our personalities to it. I don’t think it needed to be played by a queer person — Nicolas Cage could have been crazy as Joe. I don’t think there should be a hard-and-fast rule, but maybe the queer folks should be front of mind. But it’s acting. I’m still going to play straight people.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.