Get this nerd off my screen

This is a film about a reclusive, melancholic, slightly obsessive Cleveland filing-clerk called Harvey Pekar, who turns his mundane life into a cult comic book entitled American Splendor.

Not that Pekar can draw himself, but fortunately he is friends with the rather more famous Robert Crumb, who encourages him and illustrates his dyspeptic take on the world.

The film incorporates interview footage with the real Pekar, assorted cartoon versions of him (Crumb isn't his only illustrator), and there is also the droopy-faced Paul Giamitti to impersonate the cartoon writer.

All in all, it seems quite a production only to bring to a mass audience the musings of a Mr Average. Granted, for all I know, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comic books may be the very acme of the genre, but alas I've never read them, so I am in no position to comment.

Pekar gained an American audience beyond the comic book when, for a while in the late 1980s, he became a regular guest on the David Letterman Show. Pekar was invited on to be himself and provide a loser foil to the sparkling repartee of the host.

The stint ended when, disgusted with his own sell-out, Pekar appeared on TV sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with pro-strike slogans and began mouthing off about the harsh corporate reality behind Letterman's smooth act.

This is the high point of the Pekar story as depicted in American-Splendor; the low point is our anti-hero's bout with testicular cancer. Initially we see him go yellow-belly-up to terror in the face of the cellular reaper, but he rallies when his wife, Joyce (played by Hope Davis, but also appearing as herself), tricks him into making the chemotherapy the subject of one of his cartoons. This latter part of the film, which ends with the Pekars adopting the daughter of one of Harvey's wayward illustrators, is about the most moving and acute that it gets.

Falling on the bathroom floor, pulling out chunks of his already sparse hair, and generally being put through the wringer of existence is a good antidote to the humdrum reality hymned for the first 50 minutes.

But let's face it, just about anyone with a scintilla of creativity can wrest some profundity from cancer. Watching American Splendor it occurred to me - and not for the first time - that the big C does for the agnostic what the big G does for the believer: drive a quest for meaning beyond the individual.

In a sense, Pekar's whole life can be viewed as a search for meaning, and the cult success of the American Splendor comic books is a justification of the quest that all of us - however humble - undertake. That the comic should have first stage adaptation (which we also get to see, introducing yet another layer of Pekar), and now this movie spin-off, is a justification for examining with some intensity a life which cries out to remain unexamined. Or at least I suppose that's what the film-makers might say. Personally, the whole enterprise left me cold. Even given the degree of American popular cultural assimilation possessed only by Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons, I still don't think this film will hit home. It is just too goddamn whimsical, with its lovingly observed quirky characters: Pekar himself; dorky Joyce; quirky Crumb; Toby, Harvey's nerdy colleague at the Veterans' Administration; the eccentric Mr Boats, and so wearisomely on.

Toby, who has the hips of a dressmaker's form and a ludicrous squeaky voice, is a self-confessed nerd, and we are invited to sympathise with him for it. But I found Pekar himself to be a nerd, too, what with his stingy record collecting, his hoarding, and his willed inertia in place of ideals. This is a man who in his forties can still view failing to tidy a room as a political statement.

I'm actually at a loss to understand why American Splendor has got an extensive cinema release in this country. I suppose a few oldies who have spent more time smoking the herbaceous border than weeding it might be familiar with the work of Robert "Fritz the Cat" Crumb, but Pekar isn't even a blip on the British radar. It would be nice to trumpet a little movie like this, obviously made with love, and concerned with the little man; however, this isn't the one I'll tootle my bugle for. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, comics are only for kids of all ages.