American Splendor
The throne of American vagabond poet king has been vacant since the death of Charles Bukowski several years ago, but there is a new candidate for the honor. Harvey Pekar worked his entire adult life as a file clerk at a Cleveland hospital. But in his spare time, he wrote (and continues to write) tart, closely-observed autobiographical vignettes of his miserable existence, which were then illustrated by top sequential artists like Robert Crumb, Jim Woodring and Frank Stack, in the ground-breaking independent comic American Splendor.
Pekar’s work has been a private pleasure for comic aficionados since the mid-1970s, but it’s about to get a whole lot more exposure now thanks to American Splendor, a brilliant and unconventional biopic from Shari Springer Berman and Rick Pulcini. The film was a huge hit at Sundance and Cannes, and seems certain to capture a major award here at the Seattle International Film Festival.
Like the comic, the film blends fact and fiction, peeling back the movie-making process to show the real Pekar and his friends and family interacting with the directors and with the cast who portray them. It also depicts key incidents from Pekar’s life, including his first meeting with Robert Crumb, his unlikely courtship and marriage, his brief moment of fame in the 80s as a novelty-act guest on the David Letterman show, and his bout with cancer that he and his wife worked into a graphic novel (Our Cancer Year) even as it was happening.
The lasting appeal of Pekar’s own work is that it is compelling and honest, even though it is unrelentingly self-referential. The film manages to capture those qualities perfectly for the screen – an amazing feat under any circumstances, but doubly impressive in that Pekar gave the filmmakers complete creative freedom and encouraged them not to give his story “the Hollywood whitewash.” His trust paid off. In a summer full of comic-book movies, American Splendor sets the standard for the best representation of ambitious material by a truly original and profound creative talent.
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