American Splendor
For an art movement that never cracked the mainstream and whose finest practitioners barely paid the rent, the underground comics of the 1960s and '70s have had a splattery and lasting pop-culture impact. Seminal figure Robert Crumb was the focus of the celebrated 1994 documentary ''Crumb,'' whose director, Terry Zwigoff, went on to turn Dan Clowes's graphic novel ''Ghost World'' into a biting 2000 satire. Art Spiegelman found fame with ''Maus'' and New Yorker covers; Bill Griffith's ''Zippy the Pinhead'' drops daily zen-bombs in the funny pages.
Now it's Harvey Pekar's turn, and, believe me, he's probably griping about how long it took. The longtime
Cleveland file clerk, poet of the mundane, genius crank behind the ''American Splendor'' comic book, and David Letterman's holy fool finally has a film dedicated to his dyspeptic battles with the quotidian -- and it's a beauty: wise, many-layered, and funny as hell. The great joke about Pekar's work is that he can't draw to save his life, so he gets other illustrators -- notably his old friend Bob Crumb -- to ink the autobiographical rants and whimsies that fill the pages of ''American Splendor.'' The movie, written and directed by married Pekar fans Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, is an adaptation of a number of stories from the comic. Thus it's the story of one mensch's
life: Pekar's passion for old jazz 78s, the breakup of his first marriage and wooing of Joyce Brabner, his mid-'80s appearances on ''Letterman'' (which culminated in Pekar getting booted off the show for airing NBC owner GE's dirty laundry), his recent bout with lymphoma, and -- always -- his dead-end life at the Cleveland VA Hospital and the eccentric co-workers whom he immortalized in the pages of ''Splendor.'' Why would you pay to see this in a theater when you get it for free every day? Well, that's Harvey's point: Both the comics and the movie embrace the normal at the same time they celebrate an intellectual misfit's distance from it. In a neat Pirandellian twist, Pekar is played by actor Paul Giamatti -- who nails every slouch and squawk -- and by the 60-something Harvey himself, commenting with raspy bemusement on the whole movie-vs-reality thing. Joyce, bristling with smart-girl doubts, is played by actress Hope Davis with the real Brabner offering footnotes; similarly, Judah Friedlander acts the part of Pekar pal and earnest super-nerd Toby Radloff until the genuine article puts in an appearance.
The effect of this double vision (augmented by flights of fancy in which Pekar's cartoon visions come hilariously to life) is to make the case for a well-observed life that finds beauty and humor in the banal. ''American Splendor'' is a ragged scrapbook of a narrative that shuttles between the filmed and the drawn, the actual and the imagined, dramatic re-creations of the Letterman appearances and video footage of the real thing. It sketches Pekar's collisions with our culture with the wit of Crumb (who's played with droll venom by James Urbaniak) but ultimately without his bitterness. Harvey's too busy living life to mock it.
The movie is pricelessly comic -- the Harvey/Joyce scenes catalog the couple's neuroses with glee -- but it just as often reaches for something richer. One section recreates the classic, ghostly ''American Splendor'' monologue in which Pekar (drawn by Crumb) talks about discovering two other men with his name in the Cleveland phone book, and if the filmed version doesn't capture the metaphysical vaudeville of the strip, it shares its unsettling undertow.
Toward the end, ''Splendor'' gets a bit sentimental, as Harvey and Joyce weather cancer and become guardians to a young girl (Madylin Sweetin). The film offers closure, which films tend to do and which Pekar's comics avoid, and perhaps that's why an article in the current ''Film Comment'' has blasted the movie for neutering this career iconoclast into the equivalent of a cute indie-flick bobblehead doll.
I'm not buying it. Pekar still comes off plenty abrasive for moviegoers coming to him cold, but he seems to have made peace with the mainstream culture he loathes and is fascinated by. The real sell-outs are in the past -- such as when MTV exploited Toby's freak-show appeal in a mid-1980s series of spots -- and a tough, peaceful air of summing up pervades the final scenes. Harvey won his battle. Through art, he made an invisible life visible.
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