The funniest and most representative scene in “American Splendor” occurs two-thirds of the way in, when its subject, Harvey Pekar, travels to New York and finds himself in a ritzy hotel awaiting an appearance on the David Letterman show. Coming down the hallway in his belligerent, stooping shuffle, Pekar must pass a well-dressed and disapproving upper-crust woman—a “yuppie”, as he would say. They do a little dance of disgust to avoid each other, she hugging one wall, he the other. It’s a perfect moment to define the film. Any other movie would have used the woman’s snub to curry sympathy for its anti-hero, but here the moment belongs to Pekar, who relishes heaping twice as much opprobrium on the rest of the world as he believes it heaps on him.

Pekar shares with Robert Crumb, the first artist to draw him, a disdain for modern America. But unlike the Crumb of the wonderful documentary of the same name, whose misanthropic withdrawal is a form of attack, Pekar chooses to engage the irritating dimwits around him, drawing ample inspiration for his splenetic “American Splendor” comics along the way. Played with a rich mixture of exasperation and intensity by Paul Giamatti, Pekar’s snarls of anger constitute his primary appeal, painting a portrait that is one of the most unique ever put to film. The humor crackles from Pekar’s sneering disgruntlement, but the film takes it seriously, giving him more than mere quirkines; taking a great risk for a story of this kind, it gives him an unassailable dignity. As he observes his life with a toothy snarl that he brandishes as a weapon, every moment is a fresh hell into whose depths he dives like a commando of the quotidian, knife gleaming in clenched teeth.

By way of contrast, Toby Radloff, the “borderline autistic” who works with Pekar, finds “Revenge of the Nerds” as empowering as a civil rights speech by Martin Luther King. Pekar won’t hear of it. Somehow, Radloff ends up on TV, predictably becoming a figure of fun on MTV, but when the same happens to Pekar after several appearances on Letterman’s show, he ruins the gig when he suddenly refuses to go along with the joke. It’s how he ruins it that’s the key to his personality, as well as the film’s. Pekar simply walks on the Letterman show and announces that he’s fed up with everything, including the audience, which he openly berates. And that’s that. Any other fictionalized biopic, even one that was playing it close to the truth, would never have snipped a rich story thread so abruptly and with so little pyrotechnics.

Pekar is feisty and uncontrollable, and he won’t be fishbowled for the amusement of anyone. By wiggling uncomfortably out of almost every attempt to exploit his life—including, almost, the film itself—Pekar demands our respect and wins it. There is something admirable about a person who has enough self-possession not to court fame on any terms; how long will a man be able to look at himself in the mirror as the warm-up act for Stupid Pet Tricks? Especially when he already finds himself “a reliable disappointment”?

Yet his idealism is punctured moments later when he adds that “the appearances weren’t helping sales”. Pekar is really an ironist with one on the cash register, and “American Splendor” sidesteps the trap of becoming a pointless caricature of a social misfit, a tired staple of indie cinema. Granted, there’s more postmodern calculation in keeping Pekar’s “authenticity” going on than is admitted onscreen, but amazingly he remains, with unadorned obstinance, a dyspeptic file clerk from Cleveland.

To maintain its scale, “American Splendor” chronicles Pekar’s life with erratic but brilliantly interlocking strands of narrative, allowing him to be as real as possible while acknowledging the artifice of the comic book, the movie, and the other devices within the movie (such as the play). The film builds layers onto itself, but in the service of realism, and always with ingenuous economy. As soon as Harvey Pekar becomes “Harvey Pekar”, the film goes out of its way to undercut its own fictiveness, paradoxically becoming increasingly fake. Using postmodernism as a way to avoiding postmodernism, we get cut-aways, flashbacks, and bits involving the real Harvey and Joyce Pekar, all exposing and thereby humbling its cinematic trappings.

The results are spectacularly funny for most of the film, especially in one extended take when Giamatti and Judah Friedlander as Radloff finish a conversation about jelly beans, walk off the set, sit down in folding chairs, and watch the real Pekar and Radloff have a conversation about jelly beans. The Letterman scenes are filled with nice touches, as well, such as Giamatti leaving to take the stage while Joyce watches as the real Harvey walks onstage to meet Letterman. Best of all is the scene coming just after his initial diagnosis of cancer in which Harvey tells a Borgesian story of multiple Harveys appearing in the phone book. It’s quick but reveals much, and directors Burman and Pulcini succeed in carrying off the mirroring and infinite-regression mindbenders with a sure hand and a knowing wink.

The cancer diagnosis turns out to be a bummer in more ways than one.  After the bad news arrives, the movie slows down and becomes a rather ordinary domestic drama. It’s not that they resort to yanking the audience’s heartstrings, but Burman and Pulcini rely on the dramatic strength of the story to carry the movie to its conclusion. This departs from their earlier strategy, which was to emphasize Pekar’s jejune existence—just as the comic books did—with a highly stylized eye (and with the help of Crumb’s mordant pen).

The movie slyly evokes “Ulysses”, with its modernist expression of the ultramundane in the life of a lonely misfit. In particular there is one scene punctuated by allusions that are surely no coincidence. As Harvey reads Joyce’s letter while sitting on his toilet, three parts of “Ulysses” are echoed: Leopold Bloom’s black cat, Pussens, his reading of Martha’s love letter sent to his alter ego, Henry Flower, Esq., and the passage in which he pays a visit to his outhouse. Joyce observed the prosaic minutiae of daily reality the long way around, by creating a work of art as artificial as he could make it. His baroque, recondite parodies captured a singularly realistic picture of modern consciousness. Though they probably wouldn’t make any claims about trying to match Joyce, Pekar and his cohorts clearly imagined they were doing something along the same lines. As any reader of “Ulysses” will affirm, daily life is indeed, as Pekar remarks, “complex stuff”.

Unfortunately the high style inexplicably ebbs. By relying on the drama of Pekar’s “Cancer Year” to take over, the film mostly abandons its punchy non-linear flow. Once marvellously buoyant, Harvey’s story sinks like lead—in other words, exactly what you’d expect of the life of a file clerk from Cleveland. The lesson to be taken from the success of the “American Splendor” comic is that, yes, the bread of daily existence can make for interesting art. But also, more importantly, that art is the central ingredient in that formula, not life. A file clerk from Cleveland interests us because Robert Crumb draws him, just as an ad salesman from Dublin interests us because James Joyce wrote a day in his life.

Similarly, “American Splendor” works best when it relies on the bold style of its creators—its actors, animators, and writer/directors—and stumbles when it presents the details of Harvey’s life, well, baldly. Art is as much the subject of “American Splendor” as Harvey Pekar, and had the filmmakers kept this in view this movie would be a classic. Still, partly because it fails to reach those heights, the man who emerges is even more remarkable: in the end, despite everything, Pekar is just Pekar. That’s no small feat of heroism.