From the archive: "American Splendor"

Harvey Pekar is the comic-book writer best known for the leftfield autobiography American Splendor, a collection of skits and extended riffs on his essentially unheroic life. Played in the big-screen adaptation by Paul Giamatti as eternally pissed-off and put-upon - even when talking to his adopted daughter - we first meet Pekar in the mid-70s, on the occasion of his losing his voice, and the rest of the film, though far too savvy for character arcs and other movie business, goes some way to describing how exactly he refound it. A full-time hospital filing clerk, forever pulling the documents of people who were born and died in his native Cleveland and never seemed to go anywhere in between, Pekar sits around bus stops with his illustrator friend Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak), grumbling and bitching about the world, waiting for buses that never show up, and blind to the irony they're parked right outside a travel agency.

Amazingly, Pekar is terrific company: the little guy capable of transforming the accumulation of petty gripes and grudges into some vast and never-ending artistic endeavour. The bulk of the film, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, concerns Harvey's relationship with his wife Joyce (Hope Davis). "I have many redeeming features," Pekar insists during the pair's initial conversations, and - crucially - he's clipping his toenails as he does so. His opening line to her in person is no less anti-climactic: "I want you to know, right off the bat, that I've had a vasectomy." They're a match made in heaven, seemingly: she's a "self-diagnosed anaemic" with "intestinal distress" who "finds most American cities depressing in the same way."

Berman and Pulcini find time for very funny sidebars on such topics as jellybeans, men who share the same name, and the false promise of the Revenge of the Nerds franchise: as they cut between frames from the original comic books, dramatisations with Giamatti-as-Pekar, and an interview with Pekar himself (whose presence here only serves to confirm the faith the directors had in Giamatti), what builds up is an amusing treatise on the obsessive collection of available data. It's there in Harvey's substantial record and comic-book collection; there, too, in the way the filmmakers shuffle back and forth between alternate versions of the same life story: Giamatti and Davis even attend an off-Broadway play drawn from their characters' lives.

But it's never a case of too much information; you always want to know more about the very real-seeming people at the heart of the story. What Berman and Pulcini have done is to prune back a little of the obsession to which men like Pekar have always been susceptible, and found a little more space for its subject's humanity: that's important in the section of the film set during the 1980s, when Pekar and his buddy Toby (Judah Friedlander) were brought out from the margins and dragged, blinking, into the harsh lights of cultural primetime, there to act as fodder, fall guys, patsies, to be mocked for their schlubbiness. By way of compensation, the film grants its heroes a terrific scene in which Toby and Harvey share a car and, to the accompaniment of Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" declare "I AM A NERD!" - an assertion that everybody involved in the making of the film really wanted to make good on the promise the meek will inherit the earth.

Most biopics are toploaded with extraordinary or superhuman feats, but American Splendor is unusual in going the exact opposite way, taking the banality of everyday life - of our lives - as its subject, and then turning that ordinariness around to its considerable comic and dramatic advantage. Throughout, the film manages to retain its source and subject's acid-drop honesty. The final shot is of the most recent edition of the comic book, presumably inspired by the filming of the movie, on the cover of which we can clearly see Joyce bemoaning "the actors look better than we do". The truth is, in whatever form Harvey Pekar takes here - whether 2D, 3D, real or fictional, the Harvey of the past, or the Harvey of the present - the scowl remains, triumphantly, the same.

(December 2003)

American Splendor screens on Channel 4 tomorrow at 1.55am.