"American Splendor"

Cult comic-book writer Harvey Pekar -- crank and peculiar optimist -- is brought to life in a remarkable narrative film that's also part animation and documentary.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug. 15, 2003 | The semi-legendary cult comic-book writer Harvey Pekar is more generous and open than you'd expect a crank to be. And Pekar is a crank. His "American Splendor" comics -- which he has been writing since 1975 and which have been illustrated by various artists, chief among them R. Crumb -- are extensive catalogs of his neuroses and insecurities, highly detailed ruminations on his disappointments and loneliness. They're interior diaries dense with cross-hatching, figuratively and often literally speaking. Pekarland is a world of small lines that, by crisscrossing or nestling up close to one another, add up to shadows, giving us something like the texture of everyday life.

But nobody gets to be a genuine crank (as opposed to a hip showoff) without being something of a closet idealist. The thing that strikes you most about Pekar -- as he comes across both in his comics and in the new movie about his life, also called "American Splendor" -- is how open he is to the people around him, how curious he is about how they think, feel and talk. No matter how eccentric or self-obsessed he seems to be, this isn't a man who's curled in on himself. The "American Splendor" comics are peopled with the folks Pekar has encountered in everyday life: His co-workers at the Cleveland Veteran's Administration hospital, where he worked for years as a clerk; wives, current and ex-, and girlfriends, real and imaginary; friends or acquaintances he runs into on the street. He captures the rhythms and nuances of their language in ways that prove he has truly listened to them. Maybe it's his lifelong jazz obsession that has tuned his ear to the curving tones and multilayered meanings of everyday speech. But however he came by them, there are few contemporary writers of any stripe who come off as gifted at truly hearing as Pekar does.

So how do you make a movie about the gift of hearing? Or, for that matter, about cross-hatching? I'm still not sure how Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who wrote and directed "American Splendor," and Paul Giamatti, who stars in it, pulled it off. But "American Splendor" -- a narrative picture with many of the qualities of a documentary, not to mention a comic book -- is one of those rare, inventively made movies that isn't so taken with its own novelty it loses sight of its characters. Its warmth is for real, and it enwraps you.

Paul Giamatti plays Harvey Pekar -- or, rather, he plays the comic-book version of Pekar, which (partly owing to the fact that he was drawn by so many different illustrators) is very much like the real Pekar, and yet not. We can see this because the real Harvey Pekar is also in the movie, as well as some of the other characters in his books, like his wife, Joyce Brabner, and his eccentric, nerdy co-worker, Toby Radloff. They appear now and then like spacer beads in a necklace, accenting the fictionalized truth of the movie version of their story by addressing questions being asked by an off-camera interviewer, or just talking about what their lives are like.

These characters are also portrayed by actors: Judah Friedlander is Radloff, a devout Catholic who lives with his mother and has a passion for gourmet jelly beans, and who speaks in precise, clipped, nasal tones, as if every word were accented by a highlighter. Hope Davis is Brabner, a woman of laid-back but glittering intelligence, and one who's deeply and healthily in touch with her own neuroses. Playing her, Davis wears a long, dark wig with heavy-duty bangs, and she peers out at the world through a pair of giant tortoiseshell glasses, the better to drink it all in with.

It sounds more confusing than it is, having all these real people running around alongside the actors who play them. But "American Splendor" feels seamless and whole. There's no jerkiness to its internal rhythm; it jives in perfect counterpoint with the admittedly oddball beat of Harvey Pekar and his world.

You don't need to know the "American Splendor" comics to slip into tune with that world. Giamatti helps us lock into it early on, bringing the comic-book stories to life, which, in turn, illuminate some very real corners of Harvey Pekar's life. In images lifted straight out of the comics' panels, we see Giamatti knocking around the streets of Cleveland (where the real Pekar has lived for years), past drab storefronts that still speak with desperate optimism of the promise of the 1950s. The movie opens sometime around 1975, and we see Giamatti sitting on a doctor's table, awaiting a prognosis -- for some reason he's lost his voice (he's sure it's cancer, although, at that point at least, it's not), and he's told he must rest it for a while or risk losing it altogether. He returns home to his apartment (it has the slapdash, weedy messiness of a true intellectual's crib) to find his second wife, a brisk academic, throwing her things into a bag and announcing sharply, "This plebian lifestyle just isn't working for me, OK?"

Giamatti pleads with her, but, trying to follow doctor's orders, he doesn't want to speak. There's wildness in his eyes, and his face is creased in a tortured, self-protective grimace (we come to see that's a look Pekar wears a lot, even when he's happy). Finally, he has to let it out, and the words come out in a pathetic squeak that's equal parts painful and funny: "Don't go."

Next page: Live-action segues into animation seamlessly