A life less ordinary

AMERICAN SPLENDORDirected by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. Starring Paul Giammati, Hope Davis, Judah Friedlander, James Urbaniak, Harvey Pekar. 15PG cert, Screen, UGC, Dublin, 101 min

The story of a curmudgeonly cartoonist is the year's first unmissable film,

writes Michael Dwyer.

The first unmissable film of the new year arrives today, deservedly laden with awards and accolades and setting a very high standard for the months ahead. Whatever the year brings, it is unlikely to produce many, if any, movies as original as American Splendor.

Its true-life subject, Harvey Pekar, notes that "ordinary life is pretty complex stuff", and the film proceeds to illustrate his point of view with wit, style and invention. Pekar is one of life's most acute observers, a permanently hoarse and entertaining curmudgeon who, since 1976, has chronicled his personal experiences and expressed his often caustic views on a vast range of minutiae in his autobiographical comic book series, also called American Splendor.

Employed as a filing clerk at a Cleveland hospital, and generally bored with the job, he stayed on just to collect his pension long after his comic books brought him recognition and admiration.

His apartment, we see in the film, is crammed with books and records, many of them gleefully found at junk sales. It is at one of those sales that Pekar has one of those rare and life-changing encounters, meeting Robert Crumb, a greetings-card artist who went on to be celebrated as an underground cartoonist - and who would become the subject of another highly imaginative US independent film before Pekar's life was brought to the screen.

Encouraged by Crumb's success and the idea that comic books can be a valid art form for adults, Pekar starts to document his own life. The series' popularity leads to the most important meeting of his life, when a Delaware comic-store owner, Joyce Brabner, contacts him. The first thing he tells her when they meet is that he has had a vasectomy, but she is unfazed and goes on to fill the biggest gap in his life with love.

This rich, multilayered film is a funny, tender and touching yet entirely unsentimental portrait of Pekar, both through his own eyes and from the insightful point of view of its writers and directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, a young married couple whose earlier work was in the documentary area.

The remarkably innovative structure of their screenplay includes four representations of Pekar, the film nimbly moving back and forward in time. He is played in a fascinating and beguiling performance by the versatile and often underestimated Paul Giamatti.

Then there is the cartoon version of Pekar, along with appearances and voiceover by Pekar himself, and archive footage of his increasingly unruly contributions to David Letterman's TV chat show. The film's other outstanding performance features Hope Davis, who closely resembles the young Meryl Streep but is quite unrecognisable here as Brabner.

American Splendor is a film to savour and cherish, and its complex depiction of Pekar is so vivid, enthralling and surprising that it would be unimaginable for anyone to have invented him as the subject of a movie were he not already the principal character in his own offbeat life story.

RATING: *****