Even though comic book movies are all the rage right now, it will take a special kind of viewer to appreciate American Splendor.  It's part documentary and part biopic, part live action and part animation.  It's much more akin to Crumb and Ghost World than Spider-Man and Hulk, mostly on account of it being based on a superhero-less comic created by a guy who could barely draw stick figures.  Both film and comic, which share the same name, are inventive and fascinating, with the former being one of the strongest indie releases of 2003.

We first see Harvey Pekar as a boy in 1950s Cleveland (Daniel Tay), but that's merely the first of many different versions on display throughout Splendor's 100 minutes.  As an adult, Pekar is played by brilliant chameleon Paul Giamatti (Confidence), but we also see the real Pekar turn up from time to time, commenting on the adaptation of his life.  To add another layer of weirdness, Splendor shows Donal Logue (also Confidence) preparing to play Pekar in an LA stage production.  Lines are continually blurred throughout the film, which shows several characters portrayed by both actors and their real-life counterparts, as well as actual clips of a few of Pekar's unforgettably uncomfortable appearances on Late Night with David Letterman.

By now, you're probably wondering who this Pekar guy is.  He's a native Clevelander and former obsessive-compulsive record collector who had a string of shit jobs and two failed marriages under his belt when, while working as a file clerk at a VA hospital in the mid '70s, he created the caustically titled comic American Splendor.  The book, a super neo-realistic look at Pekar's extraordinarily ordinary life, was cooked up by our protagonist while waiting in a supermarket line behind an old Jewish woman trying to talk her way into a deal for a set of drinking glasses.

In a way, the Splendor books reminded me a lot of a slightly more realistic Seinfeld – it's a comic where nothing happens.  Pekar, a short, slightly pudgy curmudgeon, is definitely more George than Jerry, however.  Most of the film focuses on Pekar's life after the creation of the comic, which catapulted itself into the spotlight thanks to art contributed by fellow Clevelander Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). His celebrity, if you can call it that, earns Pekar an unusual courtship with a Delaware woman who would eventually become his third wife.  Pekar and Joyce Brabner (dead-ringer Hope Davis, About Schmidt) even collaborated on a comic in the early '90s, and part of Splendor is based on that work, but revealing the title here might be too much of a spoiler for the film.

Splendor, which was shot in the same crummy Cleveland neighborhoods Pekar has spent his entire life, was written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, a duo that has made three relatively unseen documentaries over the past several years.  Their bracingly imaginative look at a true American original (Pekar was allegedly the inspiration for Steve Buscemi's Ghost World character) shatters both the mold and the cinematic fourth wall.  Winning top awards at Sundance and Cannes helped save Splendor from a straight-to-HBO release, and we're all luckier for that.

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