You'd think all this meta-storytelling would work against the basic purity of Pekar's work - which, after all, is devoted to autobiography and naturalistic snapshots of mundane life (without, as Pekar would put it, the "getting crushed to Earth" component of American Naturalistic novels) - but it doesn't. A big key to the film's success is its smart reliance on Pekar's keen ear for dialog (not many comic book movies could so fully pull straight from the word balloons of their source material). But an equally important piece is Giamatti's performance, which captures every aspect of the comic book Pekar - the V.A. hospital grind, the curmudgeonly free-lance writer, the obsessive collector and whole-scale neurotic - believably and appealingly. When the movie reaches its most serious act, our hero's battle with cancer as originally dramatized by Brabner & Pekar in the Our Cancer Year graphic novel, Giamatti nails Pekar's fear and frustration beautifully, even when the directors briefly bobble one of the moments (Pekar's notorious final guest appearance on Letterman). It's a damn fine piece of acting.

There was a time when I first started reading Pekar's comics that I thought the title he gave his series was meant to be taken ironically. But the longer he's been writing and the more developed his vision of American life has grown, the less sarcastic his title appears. It would've been easy to turn this movie into either a sneering or a sentimentalized vision of Pekar's life and work. American Splendor, the movie, does neither. For once, this viewer's fannish expectations have been fully satisfied. . .