Fanfare for the Uncommon Man

Or at least part of it. Ironically, even as the movie shows us Harvey’s ultimate triumph, it ignores much of what his triumph was about. For starters, it makes him too likable, almost cute. Pekar’s enduring aim has been to reveal life in all its jaggedness, fury and crushing smallness, and in his comic — which won the American Book Award in 1987 — he does that. When Harvey feels rejected by a woman, he’ll think “you cunt!” and then go on to pick a fight with a totally different woman just because she’s female, too. That unsavory side of Harvey is missing from the movie. More important, so are his ideas. Pekar describes himself as “a working-class intellectual,” but the movie largely ignores both his stridently peculiar left-wing politics and his tender feelings about the decline of the Cleveland he loves. For all his self-absorption, Pekar always has been able to see beyond himself. Indeed, he’s just released the beautiful American Splendor three-parter, “Unsung Hero: The Story of Robert McNeill,” about a young black man’s experience in the Vietnam War. Its power comes from its insistent ordinariness.

Pekar’s appearances on Letterman used to make me squirm because Dave, still in his snide older-brother mode, always treated Harvey as an oddball to be goofed on rather than as a man with something to say. And that scenario has eerily repeated itself during the film’s PR blitz. When Pekar appeared on Charlie Rose, its ever-lazy host (who evidently hadn’t seen the movie) pulled a Letterman, greeting his guest’s answers with the giggles he normally saves for guys like Jackie Chan whose English is hard to follow. He didn’t take him seriously, not even when Pekar said that all he wanted from life was enough money to have a decent retirement and send his stepdaughter to college. Charlie’s whole attitude was, What a character.

Although American Splendor is innocent of such condescension, it’s very much the product of a culture obsessed with winners and losers. Harvey Pekar has the stuff of a great ’70s movie loner whose alienation should offer a snapshot of a whole society — he’s equal parts Ratso Rizzo, The Conversation’s Harry Caul and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But along the way, this story of an ordinary guy becomes a Bush Era fantasy in which the unhappy outsider not only winds up with a family but wins the media sweepstakes. No wonder people like it. A Rocky Balboa for today’s bohemian, Harvey becomes an American Idol starring in a movie about himself, a job that even Arnold Schwarzenegger would find fantastic.