Crawling across the country, American Splendor (HBO) finally opened in my neck of the woods this week. I've been anticipating this film with much the same fervor that your average X-Men junkie reserves for Hollywoodizations of Claremont's World, so I was more than eager to see it.

Being a comic book fan and a moviegoer is often a matter of regularly revising expectations: you go into a movie adaptation of your favorite graphic work with high hopes and the only way you can maintain 'em is to continually adjust the bar as you watch. Yet once Sheri Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini's flick started unreeling, I gratefully settled into the moviegoing experience without feeling like I had to make any concessions. The writer/directors capture Pekar's comics better than I know I expected.

Berman & Pulcini don't take the easy route either. Mixing images from Pekar's slice-o'-life "off the streets of Cleveland" comics with acted dramatizations of the comics plus real-life interviews with Pekar, spouse Joyce Brabner and self-proclaimed nerd/Splendor regular Toby Radloff, the movie strives for the same collation of tiny observations Pekar uses in his comic series and by-and-large achieves it. The film is chronologically structured to follow Pekar's life from his early years as a V.A. clerk and part-time record dealer through his bout of quasi-celebrity as the author of autobiographical comics and early relationship with Brabner ("Man, she's got good-lookin' handwriting," Pekar gushes as he reads her introductory letter). It does not, happily, ignore the supporting cast of real-life working stiffs who also inhabit Pekar's comic books.

As a writer and autobiographer, Pekar works with a variety of artists, each of whom renders both Harvey and his friends differently. When spouse-to-be Joyce - wonderfully played by Hope Davis (loved her delivery tossing off snap DSM diagnoses of Pekar and his compatriots) - is asked by Pekar to meet him for the first time, she's initially reluctant. She's seen, she states, so many different cartoon images of him, how does she know what he really looks like? (Is he really, for instance, as hairy as collaborator/buddy R. Crumb makes him out to be?) In the movie, we get several on-screen versions of Harvey, too: Paul Giamatti acting the role ("He doesn't look nothing like me - whatever," the genuine Pekar notes in his narration) and Pekar himself being interviewed by the filmmakers and in clips from Late Night with David Letterman. At one point, the actors playing Harv and Joyce watch a California theatre production of American Splendor, as a scene we've already seen dramatized on film is unconvincingly and comically replayed on-stage. That's a whole lotta Harvey.