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American Splendor is the third greatest movie ever made.  Forget I said that. I don’t want to build up expectations too high.

American Splendor is a docu-drama made in 2003 and you could do a lot worse than watch it tonight.  It stars the then-unknown Paul Giamatti, who puts in a stellar performance, and a cast of other relative unknowns who do the same.

It tells of American cartoonist/graphic novelist Harvey Pekar, a fairly obnoxious guy from working-class Cleveland, who accidentally discovered that he wanted to be an artist — in the broadest sense of the word. He chose as his form of expression cartoons, or graphic novels, although he couldn’t draw, but who found artists of the calibre of Robert Crum to illustrate his words and who amazingly quickly established himself as a ground-breaking new voice in the world of underground comics.  In fact, he stepped well beyond that level of fame when he was “discovered” by the David Letterman late-night show where he became a semi-regular in the 1980s.

The film is a mixture of straight documentary and dramatised action.  The two forms gently collide with each other, while substantial sections of the movie are overlaid with cartoon artwork: screens are divided into cells; real-life scenes are given a coating of painted snow; characters become drawings.

Pekar really found a home in the world of comics.  The small space available for words matches perfectly his poetic succinctness of observation.  Thus we see a beautiful drawing of this middle-aged man catching his image in the bathroom mirror one morning being tagged with, “Now there’s a reliable disappointment.”

Like Pekar’s writing, the film focuses exclusively on his own life, right down to his year with cancer. Pekar’s ambition, we learn, came from wanting to represent the lives of the people he knew, the life he led, in art, to deem their lives worthy of artistic representation, without either glorifying it or denigrating it. The sequences where he decides that the Letterman program keeps interviewing him merely in order to mock him and his friends not only really happened — right down to him being almost physically removed from the program — but get to the heart of what Pekar is about.

Yes, it’s all a bit hagiographic, but  I’m happy to live in a world where such movies are made.

PS: American Splendor is the name of this movie and the series of comics that made Pekar famous.  It is the best name for anything ever.

PPS: Also worth mentioning is the soundtrack, inspired by the fact that Harvey is a jazz buff and a collector and hoarder of old vinyl.