Harvey Pekar: Cartoon shlub.

American Splendor Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini As Harvey Pekar, the disheveled comic-book writer hero of American Splendor, Paul Giamatti gives an heroically unglamorous performance. His Pekar has the posture of a peeled shrimp that somehow managed to stand up and dress itself. His spine curls like a bass clef; his head is always bowed a bit and cocked to one side, as if he's either recuperating from a beating or anticipating another. One corner of his mouth is always fish-hooked up and back, ready to sneer. The sneer doesn't unfurl as often as you might think. In this retelling of Pekar's life, one of the man's most consistent sources of disappointment is his realization that the world either doesn't notice how much he hates it, or doesn't care.

This point is driven home in a sequence set in the 1980s, when Pekar gained cult fame as a guest on David Letterman's old NBC show Late Night. After several popular appearances, Pekar, who has gained critical success writing realistic, autobiographical comics about his own life in Cleveland, starts to hate himself for letting the show treat him as a freak, and for being unable to use his tv fame as a means of escaping his cruddy job as a hospital file clerk.

During a Letterman appearance, he criticizes NBC's labor practices and the sinister character of the network's parent company, General Electric; the same audience that greeted him with ecstatic cheers now turns on him, booing, rebelling against a man who dares puncture the entertainment bubble that surrounds us all. Letterman continues to be a famous millionaire; Pekar keeps working as a file clerk. Pekar's life and work poses the existential question: Is it possible to reject a world that barely deigns to acknowledge your existence?

Giamatti's acting is one good reason to see American Splendor. Giamatti's on-screen mate, Hope Davis, is another. As Pekar's wife, Joyce Brabner?a bespectacled, dark-haired comics fan and "self-diagnosed anemic" who sought out Pekar and wed him instantly?she embodies a new archetype: the sexy frump. (This is the second week in a row that I've been dazzled by Davis; she's also in The Secret Lives of Dentists, another realistic drama that should rank high on anyone's must-see list.)

Giamatti and Davis see the humor in these characters but never condescend. Nor do they go the other way into hipster-pandering sentimentality. The superficially similar Ghost World, which some very smart friends of mine keep insisting is a better movie, had the latter problem; beneath its veneer of empathy for nerds lurked a cloying, Chaplinesque sweet-sadness that the world was such a cold, cruel place. American Splendor isn't Chaplinesque. It takes the world's cruelty for granted but refuses to divide the world into popular and unpopular people. Instead, it presents a world stocked with two kinds of human beings?nerds like Pekar who have no power and nerds like Letterman who do.

The nerds in this movie are real nerds, though. One of the funniest sequences finds Pekar's socially autistic coworker, Toby (Judah Friedlander), joining Brabner in a rapturous discussion of Revenge of the Nerds, which Brabner calls "a story of hope and tolerance." Pekar listens, exasperated beyond measure; he'd blow his brains out if he could.

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini know and love Pekar's life and work. Like innovative theater director and filmmaker Julie Taymor, who helmed the structurally conventional Frida, Berman and Pulcini want to create a film about their subject that balances regular moviegoers' desire for a traditional biopic storyline with the hipster's need to see a movie that bends rules and defies expectations. But as a piece of filmmaking, I wasn't as taken with Splendor as many critics.

Berman and Pulcini stock the film with clever, often self-conscious devices: comic- book word bugs that establish time and place; movie frames that alternate with comics panels; comic representations of Pekar sharing space with real bystanders; documentary scenes in which the real-life Pekar and Brabner assess their own lives and the movie that purports to represent it. There's even a scene in which Giamatti's fictional Pekar wanders around a white frame trailed by pencil-drawn lines, like Daffy Duck in the Chuck Jones short "Duck Amuck." (When Brabner admits she was worried Pekar would be unattractive because in drawings, there are always "these wavy, stinky lines," Pekar insists, "Those are motion lines.")

The execution of these devices is better than the idea behind them. My problem with the comic, documentary and fourth-wall-breaking stuff isn't its existence per se, but the fact that it often feels superfluous. If American Splendor were more conventional?just a fictional story about an artist's life and work, structurally no different from any other such movie?it might have felt richer, more complete, more satisfying. It's a story of working-class noncomformist outsiders, but scene for scene, the movie's esthetic virtues are old ones. It weaves a spell, and the directors keep breaking that spell. The various devices feel like unnecessary attempts to position the movie as edgy?or at the very least, unsquare. That's a mentality Pekar's comics surely would have caught on to, and properly spanked.

Framed

Wilder vision. Scott Hamilton Kennedy's documentary OT: Our Town won't win any prizes for innovation?its style is as straightforward as you'll find. But it's absorbing stuff; set at Manuel Dominguez High School in Compton, CA, it's about a bunch of Latino and African-American kids trying to find meaning in the Thornton Wilder play and succeeding. Don't go into the movie expecting to see amateurs transformed into professionals overnight. The time frame (a few weeks in 2002) is too tight for that, and the kids have too much to deal with outside of the stage, including poverty, crime, broken homes and an aura of futility that enshrouds the whole community at times. The school's drama teacher just wants the kids to put on the production and remember their lines. That's about the best they can manage, and it still feels like a miracle.

"A lot of stuff here gets started and it either comes out crappy or doesn't come out at all," says Ebony, a 16-year-old girl who plays the Stage Manager. The woman she calls her mother used to be her babysitter; her biological mom was a prostitute who dropped her off at the sitter's one day and never came back. If you think Ebony won't have anything in common with Wilder's white, rural characters from a century earlier, think again. Grover's Corners is your town, too.