American Splendor is a lot like its subject, VA file clerk turned comic-book writer Harvey Pekar: funny, craggly and sometimes miserable.

The film is an adaptation of Pekar’s based-on-his-so-called-life comics, but it also intersperses interviews with the real Pekar, archive footage of him on Late Night with David Letterman and animated sequences. Somehow, these jarringly different methods of telling a story do. They all work together to shape a true tale about an eternally unhappy man, even when success (or at least a semblance of it) shows up at his door.

Character actors Paul Giamatti—a player in everything from Private Parts to Planet of the Apes—has the best role of his career as Pekar, a down-on-his-luck schmo who’s been through two divorces when he gets the bright idea to turn his everyday doldrums into comics. Carrying the title of American Splendor, they’re strictly an underground sensation, but eventually garner him mainstream recognition with a series of memorable Letterman appearances. More importantly, however, they bring him to Wife No. 3, Joyce Brabner, played by Hope Davis. They get married immediately after meeting, despite having awkward chemistry and generally not getting along very well. But somehow, they manage to be the constant in one another’s life, even through a cancer scare, which they documented in a graphic novel.

One problem with the film is that in sticking so closely to the Pekars’ lives, there’s no real climax. Given that Harvey narrates his own film, we know ***censored*** well he’ll survive the cancer. But the epilogue showing the real Harvey at his retirement party surrounded by family and co-workers, is bittersweet. As much as he’s unable to like himself, there are plenty of others who like Harvey.

Giamatti does an excellent job as Pekar, inhabiting his every tic, from perpetual frown to scowling brush-off. While every bit as accomplished an actor, Davis was more of a distraction, having to act under an obvious (and hideous) black wig. And as good as they are, the cast member who most resembles his real-life counterpart is Judah Friedlander, delivering a dead-on impersonation of Pekar’s ulti-nerd coworker Toby Radloff.

Overall, I liked American Splendor a lot. If it weren’t so relentlessly downbeat, I might have loved it. But then again, without the depression, it wouldn’t be true to its subject.