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Harvey Pekar, if you don't know, is a grumpy, mordant, working-class shlub from Cleveland. He worked 37 years as a clerk for the VA Hospital there, and wrote his comic book, "American Splendor," detailing the day-to-day incidents of his life. What you think of the movie will depend almost entirely on what you think of Harvey.

Mostly known for a series of appearances on David Letterman's show in the late '80s, Pekar has now been writing his autobiographical comic book for 25 years. He writes about everything in his life, from his marriage to his work to his arguments with Letterman (he eventually got thrown off the show) to his job to his cancer year.

The weird thing is that Pekar is a great writer. That's a point that isn't stressed often enough. A lot of alternative comics writers have seen Pekar's work and concluded that all you have to do to produce *A*R*T* is to simply chronicle your own life, warts and all. Warts predominantly, in fact. It is not, of course, as easy at that; and the attempts to duplicate what Pekar did in that fashion have resulted in a lot of boring and depressing books by folks who got the warts but missed the point. (Take a look at Joe Matt's cartoon diary, "Peep Show," as one example.)

Somehow, Pekar manages to tell stories about himself that most of us would kill to keep from being spread, and yet manages to make them funny, moving, and interesting. The transmutation that occurs, as he records the evanescent moments of a fairly ordinary life, are magical.

And the subjects he looks at range over every possible topic of life, from the irrational rage we get in the checkout line when someone slows us down, to the offhand conversations at work where someone says something you end up remembering forever.

The filmmakers, Shari Springer Bergman and Robert Pulcini, are documentarians who have done very well in their first fiction film. They found some very creative ways to try to illustrate what Harvey Pekar is like, including using documentary scenes of the real Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, to comment on the film and the actors protraying them, Paul Giamotti and Hope Davis.

The movie is extremely well made and well acted, but it also suffers in that it is based on Harvey's stories, and they're separate short stories. There is some unity the film needs and lacks. It comes across as a crazyquilt of incidents and scenes that never totally stitches together. But they are great incidents and scenes, and I was glad to have seen them.

I found the film amusing and funny, but when I got home I wanted to read the books again.

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originally posted: 08/18/03 06:39:29
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