The film, which chronicles the life of comic book writer Harvey Pekar, is a hybrid production featuring live actors, documentary, and animation.

[4] American Splendor premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2003, and was released in the United States on August 15, by Fine Line Features.

Flashing back to 1962, Harvey meets shy illustrator Robert Crumb at a yard sale, bonding over jazz and comics.

Frustrated and single, Harvey has a sobering moment in the VA hospital's "deceased" files, leading him to write his own stories.

Harvey publishes eight issues of American Splendor to critical acclaim but little financial gain, remaining a file clerk.

He reconnects with Alice Quinn, a former college acquaintance, and they discuss Theodore Dreiser's novel Jennie Gerhardt, but he leaves feeling lonelier.

Meanwhile, in Delaware, Joyce is frustrated with her partner in the comic book store, who has sold her copy of American Splendor No.

A week later, Harvey sees his colleague Toby Radloff eating in his car, heading to Toledo for a screening of Revenge of the Nerds.

Back at their apartment, Joyce complains about Harvey's possessions but their argument is interrupted by a theater producer wanting to adapt American Splendor into a play.

After its Los Angeles debut, Harvey's success grows, complicated by Joyce's emotional struggles and desire for children.

[6] Though Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini had directed documentaries before, American Splendor was their first narrative feature.

Of the film's alternating of fictional portrayals with real-life appearances by Pekar and his friends and family, co-writer/co-director Pulcini recalled, "It really was the only way that made sense to tell that story because we were handed this stack of comic strips where the main character never really looks the same because he's drawn by so many different artists.

"[7] Berman added that upon meeting Pekar they felt compelled to include him in the film: "We also got to know Harvey even before we wrote the screenplay.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Exhilarating both stylistically and for its entertaining, moving portrayal of an everyman, American Splendor is a portrait of a true underground original.

[15] Roger Ebert awarded the film four stars out of four in his review, calling it a "magnificently audacious movie, in which fact and fiction sometimes coexist in the same frame."

He remarked "the casting of Giamatti and Davis is perfect", writing that they "mastered not only the looks but the feels and even the souls of these two people", as well as praising Friedlander's performance.

He also found the film "delightful in the way it finds its own way to tell its own story", describing its presentation as "mesmerizing in the way it lures us into the daily hopes and fears of this Cleveland family.

[19] Harvey Pekar wrote about the effects of the film in various stories published in American Splendor: Our Movie Year (2004).