Cady's Take:

American Splendor is based on the life of comic-book everyman Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti). Harvey 's life is an unglamorous, blue-collar grind with days mostly spent in his rat-trap Cleveland home and at the VA hospital where he is, as he puts it, a "flunky."

Harvey 's life may be as exciting and pleasant as a toothache, but it's obviously interesting enough to spawn a comic book series, an off-Broadway play, a couple trips to the Letterman show and now this groundbreaking biopic.

One of my favorite scenes is the first time Harvey meets fellow comic book enthusiast and third wife Joyce Krajcar (Hope Davis), right away he informs her that he has had a vasectomy. Immediately after their first kiss, she vomits. But she marries him because she doesn't have anything better going on that week.

This documentary combines scenes of actor Giamatti as Harvey , with scenes of the real Harvey Pekar, and scenes of Harvey as drawings from his comic books. You wouldn't think this would work but it does gloriously.

It is virtually impossible not to enjoy this film about a solitary man who becomes a guardian to a teenage girl, survives a bout with cancer, and whose best friend is an autistic savant. What's there not to love?!

This is a perfect movie. I cannot think of one person who would not enjoy this movie. I cannot think of one person who would not connect on some level with one or more of its characters. It is wonderfully written, brilliantly acted, and it ingeniously incorporates the world of comic books and artists without making the film seem choppy or unfinished. In fact, this movie is the epitome of finished. Each scene is finessed, all of the people who appear on screen are talking right to you and that my friends, is what I call The Perfect Movie.

Although the movie is about, and semi-narrated by, Harvey Pekar (played by Paul Giamatti), the writer of the "American Splendor" graphic comic book series, it is really a movie about all of us. It is a movie about what we want to get out of life right now - not later, not after death, not an ultimate reward. This movie is about real people who want real things; not great things, but real things like enough money to live, good jazz music, and someone to love them. Harvey 's wife Joyce is played by the always amazing Hope Davis. I cannot explain how wonderfully these two actors embody their characters, and it is a joy to be able to watch both the actual people and the actors themselves, sometimes in the same scene.

Every now and then you find a movie that is completely unique, that stands on its own, and that cannot be duplicated. "American Splendor" is one of those movies.