MOVIE · 2003
American Splendor
ComedyDrama101 min
Harvey Pekar is a VA hospital file clerk and comic-book writer whose everyday frustrations become the raw material for his own comics in American Splendor. Paul Giamatti takes on Pekar’s rumpled, neurotic everyman voice, while Hope Davis is Joyce Brabner, the fellow comics writer who enters his orbit. Rather than stick to a straight biographical approach, the film shifts between acted scenes, documentary footage, animation, and appearances by the real Pekar and Brabner themselves. The result stays close to the texture of Pekar’s work: small jobs, cluttered rooms, awkward interviews, and a life that keeps turning into panels.
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