from Cleveland

From the town that brought us Dennis Kucinich, Great Lakes Brewing Company, and the Indians: American Splendor. Harvey Pekar’s fantastic underground comic is commemorated in this week’s filmclub pic, American Splendor.

What is splendid in American Splendor is the film’s commitment to the confusion of multiple frames: Cleveland, comic, movie, character, realism, nerd-life, disgruntlement, and marriage. Pekar might object to the romanticism, but one recalls Roethke’s existential question. Which I is I?

The answer, it turns out, is a flawed but compelling character whose claim to comic genius, played straight, captures the pulp fabric of the Cleveland quotidian. It ain’t yuppie. Warm like a worn flannel, that’s the stuff. But put that flannel on jazz and you get closer. Paint the sky slate, and you’re closer yet. Shuffle your feet. Diner. File Clerk. Retirement. Friends.

The realistic virtue of Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt is extolled. Revenge of the Nerds is panned. Pekar lives between the heron and the wren. It’s in this rust-belt rummage through comic pages that the story of a working Joe like Harvey cracks a grin-like grimace, the faint goddamn! of finding himself in frames.

Raccoon’s write-up is here.