American Splendor

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff”

Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti) files records at a Cleveland hospital by day and wants his ordinary, grumbling life to count as a story worth putting on paper. So he writes it as a comic, with Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak) among the first to draw it, and later meets Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis). Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini cut between actors, animation and the real Pekar, who sits in a plain room and talks about watching himself played.