You realise that all his humour, and Robert's, is a kind of chuckling in the ruins - of family and of American culture. Sitting cross-legged in his squalid room, his large face sad but dignified, he reminisces and jokes ruefully about his father. There is something oddly noble about Charles. With Charles, Robert shared a compulsion to draw, and a deep sense of the absurdity of human life. Charles Crumb was the star by which Robert set his illustrious career and he is the star of the film. Crumb's older brother, Charles, a gentle wreck of a man, in boyhood a hugely gifted cartoonist, also resided there at the time the film was being made (while it was being edited, he committed suicide), subsisting on a diet of tranquillisers and Victorian literature. His mother, an ex-amphetamine addict, lives in the Philadelphia house where Crumb grew up. His father was a fiercely conventional ex-naval officer who wrote manuals on "Training People Effectively", while trying to bully and beat his children into shape. The key to Crumb's disordered universe lies in his family. Anything goes: in one strip, parents, after incest with their children, conclude: "Gee, we should spend more time with the kids." His heartland is a stranger, sicker place, stalked by women with outsize backsides, ape-like heads, or no head at all. Fritz the Cat, the "Keep On Truckin' " logo, and the album cover for Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills are the bright end of Crumb's spectrum. Only the rakish tilt of his hat and the amused sneer so many of his sentences curl into, give the game away. His pebble glasses and shrugging demeanour mark him out as a bewildered nerd. Early on, as Crumb settles down to one of his detailed, cross-hatched drawings, with a record on the gramophone, you could be forgiven for thinking him to be a man as quaint and breezy as the vintage jazz tunes he works to. Terry Zwigoff's film covers all of Crumb's art and delves into every cranny of his dark psyche. His scabrous drawings are both a comment on a land blighted by commerce - in which Hollywood offers Crumb millions to work in animation - and a refuge from it. The most admirable thing about him is his refusal to sell out. Crumb's art crouches on the border between genius and insanity, fantasy and pornography, satire and cynicism. This is a portrait of the artist as a seriously weird man, not overcoming but succumbing to his demons. Crumb (18), a documentary about comic-book artist Robert Crumb, buries that tradition. Ignorant of art, Hollywood turns the artist's life into a triumph against the odds - a kind of American dream. THE BIO-PIC has become a by-word for boredom, its stumbling then soaring trajectory dampening our lust for lives.
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