That Gangsta enough for you? - Joaquin Phoenix in a fight with a heckler in Miami

March 12, 9:15 AMPop Culture ExaminerDominic Patten

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Is he for real or is Joaquin Phoenix just pulling a celebrity scam on everyone? The latter is more and more firmly becoming the consensus ever since the Oscar nominated actor announced late last year that he was giving up his thespian career for hip hop stardom. 

Early Thursday morning in Miami, with his now trademark indie band rip off long hair and beard, Phoenix took to the stage and soon took right off it. Unlike his January appearance in Las Vegas, where Phoenix appeared to drunkenly stumble off the edge of the stage, this time the 34 year old was on the attack. Straight for a heckler. After a man in the crowd kept yelling at him, Joaquin Phoenix, pictured here before the show,  stopped his rap rhymes and started berating the audience member back. "We have a b**** in the audience," Phoenix said into the mic as he was being filmed, as he has constantly by his brother-in-law Casey Affleck since he announced his career change. Then at the height of equalitarianism, Joaquin screamed, "I've got a million f***** dollars in my f***** bank account. What have you got?" That's when the fighting started.

Wanna be ringside in the club? Click here for video of Joaquin Phoenix's onstage rant & leap into the crowd after the heckler. Note the extreme profanity and the audience's chants of "Joaquin, Joaquin"

The night hadn't started well when the double Oscar nominee was supposedly hours late for his show at the LIV nightclub in the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel. Still, it looked like it was going to go better than the Walk The Line star's almost incoherent appearance on David Letterman to promote, if that's the right term to use in this case, his self proclaimed last film Two Lovers, co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow. The exchange with the late night host seemed to assure the fact that Phoenix, who has had admitted problems with booze in the past, was under the influence - until the interview was over and just before the cameras cut to commercial, viewers could see Phoenix and Letterman suddenly having a normal conversation. Was Dave in on the joke? Again, the rumors swirled that Joaquin Phoenix was pulling an Andy Kaufman. Like the famed comic, was the actor, dutifully filmed every step of the way, trying to pull a fast one on fans and the notion of what's real in a celebrity obsessed world?

Click here for more on the train wreck that is Two Lovers & the movie's stars Gwyneth Paltrow & Joaquin Phoenix 

Just got to have more Joaquin Phoenix? Click here for the first word on whether or not this is for real? Is Joaquin walking the line or busting a move?

The fight in Miami may pump up Joaquin Phoenix's street cred a bit, but he's going to have to put some real muscle behind whatever this act is or he'll end up in a circus more fitting to Britney Spears than to a would-be Eminem. And that’s not bad, that’s just sad, performance art or not.