With barely the skills to craft respectable stick figures, Cleveland paper pusher Harvey Pekar managed to become a living legend and cult hero in the world of underground comics. That's because with a novelist's eye for detail, Pekar is able to draw inspiration and scenes from his arguably uninspiring life in a dead end office job and as an obsessive/compulsive record collector.

Luckily, he met R. Crumb during his years scouring rummage sales for the holy grail of jazz records, and years later, Crumb agreed to illustrate Pekar's strips, which under the ironic name, "American Splendor," became much sought-after.

Since then, Pekar became a regular on Letterman for a while, won some National Book Awards for a graphic novel, "Our Cancer Year," written with his wife, about his battle with cancer. Pekar visited Milwaukee during a tour supporting that novel. His story was made into a stage show in California and when MTV visited Pekar in Cleveland, they fell in love with his co-worker, self-described ultra-nerd Toby Radloff and gave him 15 minutes of fame on the music network in the 1980s.

Pekar's life is the basis for this 2003 101-minute film, "American Splendor" -- written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini -- starring a pre-"Sideways" Paul Giamatti as Pekar. Giamatti is brilliant, an especially difficult task in a film where the real-life subject appears on screen talking about his life from time to time. That allows easy comparison and Giamatti has captured Pekar's look, sound, walk and general grim outlook.

Pekar says "ordinary life is pretty complex stuff," and it certainly seems true for him. He struggles with relationships, he's not satisfied with his job, he's just about dissatisfied with every aspect of his life. That is, until he meets Joyce, a fan who becomes his wife and begins to show him another side of life, although it's a difficult journey for him. That Joyce arrives in time to help Pekar cope with his cancer treatment is a godsend. Only she seems able, after some cajoling, to convince him that to write about his experience will draw him outside of the experience.

And it is exactly that removal of self from one's own experience that seems to have fueled "American Splendor," the comics. If Pekar wrote about his job, his relationships, his dismal existence, then maybe he could extract himself from it for a while.

The film tackles all of it: Letterman, "Our Cancer Year," the comic, the failed marriages, Joyce, their adopted daughter. Interspersed are interviews with Pekar, his co-worker Radloff, his wife Joyce. It's fast-moving, fun, witty, smart and often sad.

Letterman may have poked fun at Pekar for laughs, but he's the American working man with an intellectual bent. He's smart enough to know he's unhappy but still incapable of turning his life around ... or is he?

"American Splendor" screens at UWM's Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd., Thursday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m.