Famous comic book character Harvey Pekar’s life is featured in American Splendor, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcine. The film switches back and forth between dramatizations with actors and interviews of the real Harvey Pekar and his friends. The film begins when Harvey (played by Daniel Tay) is eleven years old on Halloween night; at one house, he is criticized for having no costume, so he pulls out of the annual charade and resolves to have a real rather than a plastic life. Next, Harvey’s second wife is packing up to leave him (now played by Paul Giamatti). He dropped out of college and is a file clerk at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Cleveland, obviously a mismatch for his wife, Lana (played by Vivienne Benesch), who now has a Ph.D. Harvey’s quest for authenticity leads him to write stories about real people for a cartoon series, though he cannot draw. His onetime neighbor and friend Robert Crumb (played by James Urbaniak), who works at the American Greeting Card Company, is amazed when he returns to Cleveland in 1972, so he decides to draw the stories into the first issues of a comic book for both adults and children. Called American Splendor, the comic book first appears in 1976 and is such a hit that he attracts the attention of David Letterman in 1986 for yearly visits until 1988, when Letterman can no longer handle his candor. Meanwhile, one of his fans, Joyce Brabner (played by Hope Davis), is frustrated one day when copies of the latest issue of American Splendor have been sold out in the comic book store that she runs with a partner in Wilmington, Delaware. She writes Harvey, they converse by telephone, and soon she comes by train to Cleveland. Harvey quickly informs her that he has had a vasectomy, and he does not tidy up his apartment so that she will not get the wrong idea about him. After a few social outings, she says, “Let’s skip the courtship and get married,” which they do. Harvey accepts her idiosyncrasies and vice versa, they marry, and she moves to Cleveland. Although the marriage is not a “live happily ever after” fantasy, the two enjoy each other because they are honest and real people, who in turn attract decent if unglamorous friends, including Harvey’s coworker Toby Radloff (played by Judah Friedlander), who is proud to be a nerd. At one point Harvey is diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and he suffers through chemotherapy and possibly radiation therapy, an ordeal that Joyce shrewdly realizes will make a great story for a hardcover comic book, Our Cancer Year (1994), so she hires an artist named Fred (played by James McCaffrey), to depict Harvey’s suffering until he is pronounced free from cancer. (Actually, Frank Stack is the artist.) Laughter comes easily in American Splendor as Harvey and his friends enjoy being themselves rather than conforming to some stereotypic model of the exemplary American. American Splendor instead urges everyone to stop being conformist clones and spouting bullshit, though the tagline is “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” Issues of American Splendor are still being published. MH