Towards the end of AMERICAN SPLENDOR, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's ruefully hilarious and delightfully twisted screen rendering of file clerk/jazz critic Harvey Pekar's graphic novel series of the same name, Paul Giamatti as Pekar ponders people in the telephone book who have the same name as his. "Who are these people? What do they do? Who is Harvey Pekar?"

The answer is that we are all Harvey Pekar, well, I certainly am. Look at me. I'm an angst-ridden middle-aged woman living in the suburbs of New Jersey. OK, so I don't work a menial job I hate in a V.A. Hospital, I work an actually quite interesting and rewarding professional/technical job, but it IS in a psychiatric facility, where I was told by my department's director at my interview: "There are two reasons to work here: The time off and the retirement plan." It's an environment which, like Pekar's V.A. hospital, is similarly indulgent of its employees' personality quirks, one in which the employees, like Pekar's wife Joyce Brabner, categorize each other into the correct DSM-IV group. When I'm not working, I'm writing movie reviews like this one, laboring under the delusion that people are actually interested in what I have to say. I have a Victor VVIII tabletop Victrola, and a very small collection of popular songs on 78 rpm records from the acoustic era. I used to collect 1920's hats until all those hat boxes started taking over my spare room. I have trouble throwing anything away, I obsess about politics to anyone who will listen (and many who won't), I find most of life hopelessly absurd, and I frequently think I don't live on the same plane of reality everyone else does.

I am Harvey Pekar. And so are you, or you wouldn't be reading this. And because of movies like Crumb and Ghost World and now AMERICAN SPLENDOR, we are no longer misfits. We are now cool. Is this an improvement? Is this supposed to make us feel better?

In 1976, encouraged and assisted by friend Robert Crumb (of Fritz the Cat fame, played here by James Urbaniak), Pekar published the first American Splendor, in which he detailed the absurdity of the minutiae of an ordinary life, because after all, "ordinary life is pretty complex stuff." Comic book artists like Crumb, who cut their teeth in the underground comix movement of the 1960's, were among the first to realize the potential of the comic book as an adult medium. The graphic novels that grew out of this movement, unlike the more sophisticated versions of the Marvel universe such as Frank Miller's Dark Knight series, don't deal with superheroes, even angsty ones, but rather, share a cynical, melancholy view of how mundane contemporary life dulls us into a stupor. Each frame is a kind of Zen koan, conveying a world of commentary in a simple drawing. The author gazing at his reflection in a mirror muses, "Now there's a reliable disappointment." While riding a bus, he observes, "Taking the bus saves time, but it doesn't lengthen yer life." This "every frame tells a story" technique is used by many contemporary cartoonists, including Bill Griffiths in his Zippy Comix, and Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; but only Pekar actually reflects his real self in this way.

Because Pekar's graphic novels are illustrated by a number of artists, including the aforementioned R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman, it makes perfect sense for Pekar himself to exist in multiple incarnations in the film -- in himself, as narrator, in Paul Giamatti's spot-on portrayal, and in the line drawings that pop up periodically and berate one of the other Pekar manifestations. In one of the most demented breakdowns of the "fourth wall" since George Burns used to watch his own television show as part of his own television show, the camera pulls back from an already hilarious scene in which Giamatti's Pekar and Judah Friedlander as uber-nerd Toby Radloff discuss the various flavors of Jelly Bellies. Gone is the file room setting, replaced by the same furnishings, in the same positions, against a stark-white background -- with Giamatti and Friedlander havng retreated to the background to allow the real Pekar and Radloff riffing on the same subject. I half expected the camera to pull back some more, revealing the entire sequence to be rendered in real time by Bugs Bunny.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR boasts some of the most astonishingly spot-on casting in recent memory. It's not that Paul Giamatti so strongly resembles Pekar; in fact, Pekar himself observes, ''He's the guy playing me...he don't look nothin' like me, but whatever.'' Actually, Pekar's actual persona resembles Christopher Lloyd's Reverend Jim character from the old Taxi television series. But Giamatti so strongly conveys who Pekar is, the Zen of Harvey, as it were, that especially after we have seen the real thing, we can honestly believe these two men are one and the same person, even when they're in the same room.

Hope Davis, who perfected the art of playing depressives in Mumford, adds a touch of snark to her portrayal of Pekar's current wife and collaborator, the equally depressive Joyce Brabner. If your jaw doesn't drop when you see the real Brabner, and you don't marvel at what an inspired choice Davis would have been for this role even without such a body of work behind her, you haven't been paying attention. As for Judah Friedlander's pitch-perfect re-creation of the real Toby Radloff's highly stylized, clipped over-diction, it's so hard to believe that there could be one person like this in the world, let alone two. I have to believe that for some reason known only to himself, Friedlander decided a long time ago that this was someone he wanted to emulate. (Radloff was even a short-lived MTV anti-star in the 1980's during the heyday of Revenge of the Nerds.)

But this is first and foremost Giamatti's film to carry on his shoulders. This master of cinematic zhlubbery has been expertly playing weasels, sleazebags, and buffoons for so long, in so many films, that he's often recognized as simply, "Hey, you're that guy!" In the film's early scenes, such as when a voiceless Pekar is trying to pursuade his second wife not to leave; or when the line drawings of himself berate him for not asserting himself in the face of the "old Jewish lady" in front of him in the supermarket checkout line, a lesser script would have reduced him to an even more hapless, zhlubbier version of Woody Allen's old schlemiel character. But don't be fooled, for this is not just another middle-aged Allenesque Jewish malaprop. Pekar's uniquely twisted view of the universe is literally channelled through Giamatti's very skin. Glowering under his eyebrows and scowling out of only half of his mouth, Giamatti doesn't merely portray Pekar, he becomes him -- not an easy task when the real thing is sitting right there in the next scene.

A film about a character for whom music is so important had better have a really killer score, and AMERICAN SPLENDOR does. From the opening credits, Mark Suozzo's jazzy score evokes a snarkier, bitter version of the kind of 1950's hipster effect John Williams was going for in Catch Me if you Can. Liberally peppered with music from jazz greats such as Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, not one but TWO versions of "Ain't that Peculiar", and a selection from R. Crumb and the Cheap Suit Serenaders, this is a movie soundtrack that more than sets off the film, it's music from a life.

Directors Berman and Pulcini demonstrate a very real understanding of the graphic novel universe in which they're filming, and the fact that Pekar's work is in fact about everyday life, the technique of turning a movie scene into a comic book frame, complete with descriptive blurb in the upper-left corner of the screen seems not in the least bit contrived. Whereas Ang Lee's use of split screen and multiple frames in The Hulk sought to re-ground the CGI extravaganza in its roots, Berman and Pulcini see their medium as not a departure from, but simply an extension of, the comic book form. Pekar, whether as himself or as portrayed by Giamatti, segues effortlessly from stage set to location shot to line drawing. When comic books reflect reality, does reality then become a comic book? As Harvey asks, if Harvey dies, does the comic book character go on?

A few years after his "cancer year", Pekar is now cancer-free, still in his uniquely peculiar marriage to Brabner, and is raising a fellow cartoonist's adolescent daughter -- and he's still complaining: "Yeah, I got this movie made. But Joyce and I still fight like crazy, I worry about money, the kid’s got ADD.” With a relatively stable life, an acclaimed film about his work under his belt, the pension he always toiled for now a reality, and his work now accessible to an entirely new audience outside the core of trash culture mutants who have always gravitated to this sort of thing, will success spoil Harvey Pekar? I certainly hope not. "It's just my perspective," he says early in the film, "...gloom and doom." Don't ever lose that, Harv. It's what we love about ya.

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2003 Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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