Film

American Splendor

Name: American Splendor
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Released: 2003
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, Judah Friedlander, James Urbaniak, Earl Billings

Harvey Pekar was a Cleveland file clerk who turned his miserable, unglamorous life into an underground comic — and this film turns that comic back into a movie, with Paul Giamatti playing him while the real Pekar narrates and pops up onscreen. It's funny, grumpy, formally sly, and quietly moving: a portrait of a man who found meaning in refusing to romanticise anything, least of all himself.

TMDb rating

7.1

If you liked this

Ghost World2001

Same director, Terry Zwigoff, working from another underground comic, with the same deadpan affection for misfits who refuse to perform likability. Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi are perfect.

But It's slower and sadder than its poster suggests — more melancholy hangout than plot-driven comedy.

Sideways2004

Giamatti's other great sad-sack performance, a year later, playing a different flavour of failed, self-aware man. If you loved him here, this is the victory lap.

But Wine-country midlife-crisis comedy is a very specific mode, and some find its two leads exhausting rather than endearing.

Ed Wood1994

Tim Burton's warmest film, a biopic of a genuinely terrible filmmaker told with total tenderness — the same trick American Splendor pulls, finding dignity in a life nobody else would bother filming.

But Black-and-white and stylised in a way that some viewers find distancing rather than charming.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Crumb1995

Robert Crumb is a character in American Splendor and Pekar's real-life friend and collaborator. Here you get him unfiltered, in the documentary register the fiction film only gestures at.

Terry Zwigoff's documentary about the real Robert Crumb — the underground cartoonist played by James Urbaniak in American Splendor — is one of the great, unnerving portraits of an artist and his deeply damaged family.

But Genuinely disturbing in places; this is not the cozy indie-comic vibe, it's raw and often upsetting.

Stranger Than Fiction2006

A studio comedy that literalises the same idea American Splendor plays with — a man realising he's a character in someone else's story — but with Will Ferrell going quiet and strange.

But The high-concept premise is cuter and more sentimental than anything Pekar would have tolerated.

Lars and the Real Girl2007

Midwestern deadpan, a deeply lonely protagonist, and a town that decides to be kind to him anyway — gentler than American Splendor but built from the same unglamorous small-town material.

But The premise sounds like a joke and asks you to take it completely seriously; not everyone makes that leap.

Half Nelson2006no page yet

Ryan Gosling as a burnt-out teacher, filmed with the same handheld, unglamorous honesty about a life that isn't working out — no arc, just a person you come to know.

But Deliberately withholds catharsis; if you want resolution, this will frustrate you.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl2015

Another memoir-to-comic-to-film adaptation, with animated panels bursting into live action the way Pekar's comic-book self argues with his live-action one.

But Frank about teenage sexuality in ways that some viewers will find confrontational rather than charming.

Big Fish2003

The opposite instinct — a man who mythologises his ordinary life instead of flattening it — makes a useful companion piece on what storytelling does to a self.

But Whimsical and sentimental where American Splendor is dry; Burton's sincerity can feel syrupy by comparison.

World's Greatest Dad2009no page yet

Robin Williams as another unglamorous, overlooked man whose private writing suddenly finds an audience — much darker, but chewing on the same question of who gets to be a story.

But Turns genuinely bleak in its back half; the comedy curdles on purpose and won't be for everyone.

Persepolis2007

Same lineage exactly — a personal comic memoir turned into film by the person who lived it — but done in animation instead of live action, and set against history instead of a Cleveland hospital cafeteria.

Marjane Satrapi's animated adaptation of her own graphic memoir about growing up in revolutionary Iran — hand-drawn, funny, furious, and just as insistent on the ordinary texture of an extraordinary life.

But Subtitled and animated, which is a bigger ask for some viewers than a live-action indie comedy-drama.

F for Fake1973

Both films dissolve the line between the real subject and the performed version of them, and both ask, with real seriousness, what 'authenticity' even means once a life becomes art.

Orson Welles' slippery essay-film about an art forger blurs documentary and staged fiction, real people and performed versions of them, decades before American Splendor made that its whole method.

But Deliberately disorienting and non-narrative; if you want a story rather than a meditation, this will feel like a trick.