Will the real Harvey Pekar please stand up?

Report from Seattle (yeah, this is day two):

A half hour into “American Splendor,” I realized with the usual dull thud that I was seeing the life that I was supposed to have lived. Harvey Pekar is a familiar name to, one, those who read comic books or, two, those who (or used to) watch the David Letterman show. He’s a gloomy, determinedly ordinary guy from Cleveland who, in an effort to find some sort of artistic outlet, made himself into a cartoon character.

Only unlike his real self, — the self that remained a file clerk in a veteran’s hospital for all his working life — Harvey Pekar is no ordinary cartoon creation. He’s no hero (certainly no superhero), unless your idea of heroism is a guy who strives to show every aspect of life with a withering sense of realism. That’s Harvey Pekar: He’s so intent on avoiding any “phoniness” (the Holden Caulfield syndrome) that he strives, and mostly manages to, find something intriguing among almost any aspect of his real life — his friends, his coworkers, old ladies standing in line at the grocery store.

In the film, Paul Giamatti doesn’t so much capture Pekar perfectly as interpret him brilliantly. This is clear because co-directors Shari Springer Berman and
Robert Pulcini have made “American Splendor” (a title taken from Pekar’s comic-book series) into a blend of narrative and documentary film: Not only do we see Giamatti and Hope Davis portraying Harvey and his third wife Joyce Brabner, but we see the real Harvey and the real Joyce commenting both on their real lives but on the movie as well. At first this seems strange, but then it doesn’t. In the end, it seems only natural.

Just as Harvey’s life feels natural to someone who, somewhere along the life, feels as if he somehow stepped into someone else’s world and became something of a success writing about movies and books. At age 20, having flunked out of two colleges and in uniform , I was exactly the kind of guy that Harvey Pekar was. Only I didn’t stay that way. I became someone else. Yet I’ve never left my Harvey side behind. Not completely.