American Splendor

A film about a comic book writer. Harvey Pekar is a clerk in a hospital archive in Cleveland. The work is dull, the pay is low and nothing happens in his life. One day he decides to write that. He cannot draw; he sketches the scenes roughly with stick figures and gives them to artists. The subject is his own day: waiting in a queue, arguing with a neighbour, the car breaking down. The comic is published and finds readers. Pekar becomes known but does not leave his job; he keeps working in the archive. From there the film covers the later parts of his life: his marriage, appearing on a television programme and the row that came out of it, a period of illness, and starting to raise a child. The idea of the structure is that it is mixed. There are three layers: scenes played by actors, the real Harvey Pekar talking to camera, and comic panels. The three keep folding into each other, and in one scene the actor and the real man stand side by side. What the narrative is interested in is not art but ordinariness: Pekar's whole claim is that life itself is worth telling, and the film carries that claim in its form. Paul Giamatti plays Pekar and Hope Davis plays his wife Joyce. Judah Friedlander is in the cast; the real people appear in the film as well. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini directed. The film won the grand prize at Sundance. Who it is for: anyone who likes biographies of unusual shape and comic book culture. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a likeable character; Pekar is bad-tempered and gloomy and the film does not soften him.