The cranky 'American'
Or, Splendor in the aisles.

By Johnny Ray Huston

THE NIGHT'S FINAL screening of Ghost World hadn't started yet. In fact, due to a faulty cog in the multiplex machinery, the three dozen or so people who'd bought tickets were forced to loiter in the tiny hallway outside the theater. AMC Kabuki employees were inside, making sure every last soda-soaked Jujube and Sour Patch Kid was pried off the sticky floor. As the audience members stood, uncomfortably, next to each other, I looked at the assorted nuts and overgrown kids around me and had the same thought most of them were probably having: these people look like Dan Clowes characters. Was this proof of Clowes's powers of observation? Or was it an indictment of subcult San Francisco?

The ghost of that Ghost World incident returned to me when I went to a special preview of American Splendor, the new film inspired by the comic book life of Harvey Pekar. This time the awkward moment before the film happened in the theater. A few Pekar friends had given testimonials while everyone sat munching promotional jelly beans: K Chronicles creator Keith Knight said Pekar's was "the first autobiographical stuff" he'd seen upon moving to S.F.; Spain Rodriguez reminisced about the time Pekar and a former girlfriend spilled submarine sandwich juice all over the brand-new Naugahyde seats of his car. All the while, Pekar himself could be seen near the right aisle, holding one hand up to his forehead as if in pain. He was introduced. He rasp-gasped a few words of welcome. There was an uneasy silence. Then his wife, Joyce Brabner, broke it. "Don't look at us," she griped. "We're not the entertainment."

But you are, Joyce, you are. If not in "real life," then in the reel life of Shari Springer Berman and Roger Pulcini's film, which posits you and your husband as the latest comic book antiheroes to counter Spider-Man, the Hulk, and other superhuman creatures of the Metreon. American Splendor grafts the documentary portraiture of Terry Zwigoff's Crumb on the fictional narrative of Zwigoff's Clowes adaptation, Ghost World, and comes up with something less than either of those great films – but still the best U.S. fictive filmmaking in this summer of bummers. As TV and movies become increasingly hard to differentiate, here's a show that, as Howard Hampton points out in a recent Film Comment essay, looks an awful lot like HBO.

Entertainment, a word Brabner spoke with disdain, is Hampton's special bugaboo; detached from the grinding of weekly film reviewers, he's free to craft a Splendor-centered, Manny Farber-phrased hit piece that hasn't met a critic's darling it doesn't want to knock off with sniper-style efficiency: Far from Heaven is "so blissfully self-conscious it reviews itself," but it's the smugness of American Beauty, Adaptation, and About Schmidt he especially hates. Hampton doesn't think the lovable schlub at the center of the film version of American Splendor – a film "bursting with vending-machine freshness," in his words – is Harvey Pekar. So he translates Pekar's crankiness into his own critical voice.

He does have a point. Springer Berman and Pulcini's style of filmmaking is HBO-ready, and sprinkled with Sundance-brand whimsy. American Splendor travels from vignette to vignette, losing and gaining momentum, rarely mimicking the long interior monologues or abrupt endings of Pekar's comics. It livens up and finds a purpose with the arrival of Hope Davis's Brabner; the film's chief strong point is its characterization of her marriage to Pekar. The random everyday specificity in Pekar's comic book portrayal of the relationship deepens when stretched to feature length; it's been a while since a film has been this sympathetically attentive to the annoyances and compromises of coupledom. Here is a fine romance, or at least one that's genuinely, insightfully similar to at least one sardonic pair I know.

The acting, though, consists mostly of mannerisms. Letting her wig broadcast that she's opted, perhaps rightly, for caricature, Davis brings her trademark slow blink of exasperation to Brabner. Judah Friedlander's line readings as Toby Radloff – overly stressed consonants and Martian superiority – result in a relative of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy. James Urbaniak's R. Crumb is a two-dimensional model of hipster shabby chic; set next to Pekar's terminal slump, he actually seems debonair. As Pekar, Paul Giamatti glowers. The eyes have it, or in this case, don't. Blazing beneath a pair of antic caterpillar brows, Pekar's peepers have a mad-scientist manic electricity; Giamatti favors dull, defeated shoe-gazing.

The film casually addresses the fact that Pekar's comic is drawn by a variety of artists. Allowing characters' appearances to shift from one sequence to another (one minute, Drew Freidman's smudgy daytime nightmares; the next, Joe Zabel's crisp nervous energy), an all-animated version might have imaginatively extended this trait, which simultaneously defines Pekar's portraiture and makes it playfully elusive – even free spirited. Hampton's Film Comment screed snarls that the movie's Cleveland might as well have been Toronto, a cheap shot that isn't entirely true. Having grown up one state away from Ohio, I'd say American Splendor has the atmosphere right; it just doesn't dig beneath the paint-flaked surface of the diner signs. Watching, I thought about Pekar's Cleveland as imagined by Sadie Benning, whose Flat Is Beautiful stares at Midwestern – in this case, Milwaukee – blight with the patience of a resident.

Springer Berman and Pulcini are more at home depicting Pekar's infamous first and last tangos in New York with David Letterman in the '80s, though their facility at matching "real" TV footage to their own dramatization is very 2003. Pekar was one of a handful of ornery eccentrics whom Letterman – then occupying the Conan O'Brien shift – occasionally deigned to duel. Crispin Glover, whose spastic, platform-shoed high kicks narrowly missed Letterman's upturned nose one night, has had plenty of celluloid opportunities, but Hollywood only gave the late, great Brother Theodore (now there's someone who demands a feature-length film bio) a trip to The 'Burbs, playing silent second fiddle to Tom Hanks, for his years of theatrical hilarity.

If Pekar's star treatment doubles as his retirement fund – a claim he and Brabner have turned into a stand-up routine while promoting the movie – he deserves every penny he gets. The film, for all its charms, is another story. Over the past five years, movie theaters have hosted an American wedding, a pair of American psychos and pies, some American history (self-rated X), and of course, an irony-laced American beauty. American Splendor adds some much needed local character to this cultural shorthand, but – as Hampton rightfully points out – it's still largely an indie assembly-line product of American filmmaking's malaise.