“Cinema has traditionally been regarded as the art that encompasses all the other arts,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in a recent Chicago Reader article. “But start considering how successfully cinema encompasses any particular art form and the premise falls apart.” It’s a worthy argument for the autonomy of film, but I can still name a number of cases that incorporate other forms in distinctly cinematic ways: Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat, for instance, conveys the spirit of Shakespeare’s comedies better than any other movie I know.

Regardless, the creation of poly-media hybrids is by no means a smooth process—a point that’s well illustrated by the recent release American Splendor. The film, an award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, uses fiction and non-fiction techniques to tell the life story of underground comics writer Harvey Pekar. Despite an engaging and straightforward narrative, it can still be considered formal experiment in its effort to adopt the attributes of another medium—American Splendor comics in this case.

It is a clearly defined experiment, too, as the movie frequently sets live actors against pencil-drawn backgrounds, thought balloons and other actors made up to resemble caricatures of real people. As the movie suggests, this is Harvey Pekar’s life as the man himself would tell it (To bring the message home, the real-life Pekar even narrates parts of the film).

Pekar, it is established, is a life-long grump and eccentric whose humdrum existence—epitomized by his career as a file clerk in a Cleveland hospital—is relieved through his passion for comic books. Through the influence of his friend Robert Crumb, Pekar turns to writing (though not drawing) his own comics based on his life and observations. He becomes a cult hero on the success of his work, creates a lasting, if dysfunctional, marriage and creative partnership with a devoted reader, and becomes a regular guest on Late Night with David Letterman in the mid-80s.

The film moves like a comic book series in that it breaks Pekar’s life into episodes, dividing major sequences with interviews with the real Pekar and his friends and family. The conceit is particularly effective when used to convey the honesty that made the American Splendor comics such a hit: After a dramatized sequence involving Harvey and his nerdy co-worker (a sheltered, stammering neurotic that Pekar’s wife describes as a “borderline autistic”), the film cuts to a dialogue between the characters’ real counterparts. They are dressed identically to the actors who portray them and speak similarly, too; a scene which even the filmmakers hint is close to parody turns out to be a faithful reproduction of the truth.

Two of the models here are Terry Zwigoff’s last two films, the landmark documentary Crumb and the Daniel Clowes adaptation Ghost World. From Crumb, directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman (married documentarians making their fiction-film debuts) take Zwigoff’s respectful air towards U.S. counterculture, treating comics artists with a seriousness that movies typically reserve for composers and drug dealers. From Ghost World is a similar steadiness with actors that balances realistic nuance with an animator’s eye for exaggeration. Hope Davis, as Pekar’s loving third wife, is particularly effective; her hypochondria and sympathy for outcasts seem directly related to her slouched posture, gawky stare and straight inky-black hair.

While certainly reverent towards their source material, Pulcini and Berman lack Zwigoff’s confidence in letting comics art speak for itself. The use of animated comic book frames is a fun idea, but it feels increasingly like a gimmick that distracts from, rather than builds on the material. Much of the beauty of Ghost World stemmed from the director’s deep understanding of comics: The underscored-yet-familiar mise-en-scene and careful attention to movement within the frame suggested living panels without overstating the connection. (The same can be said of Sam Raimi’s underrated work on Spider Man.) Pulcini and Berman, on the other hand, exert so much energy convincing us that comics are really art that they eventually diminish a sense of what that art is.

While I haven’t read any American Splendor, the off-the-cuff observations and gentle exaggeration I associate with Clowes, Chris Ware and Ben Katchor only shows up in a few scenes. Harvey’s rumination on once learning that a man with his same name had died (and was subsequently taken out of the phone book, where the two had vied for space) is made touching in the context of his grueling chemotherapy treatment. Paul Giamatti, playing Harvey, addresses the camera in a no-nonsense style while walking across a blank screen, followed by a pencil-drawn horizon until he fades out of the frame. One of the most touching scenes of the movie, it’s also one that seems to be taken directly from the comics.

The main problem with American Splendor the movie is its reliance on Hollywood storytelling clichés to explain the life of a misfit. Just like A Beautiful Mind or Shine, Pekar’s talent is often simplified to serve as a justification of his outsider position and anti-social tendencies. Comics are what make Harvey different, but they are also his saving distraction when diagnosed with testicular cancer (a fairly sentimental subplot that ends up taking over the last half-hour of the movie).

An early montage showing Harvey retreating from everyday life to turn his experiences into comics panels could just as easily depict a musician sitting inspired at a piano bench or a poet composing verse. American movies about artists generally seem to imply that making art is worthwhile only if it leads to instant results or, better yet, success; American Splendor, for all its “independent film” buzz, is no exception. It feels, in short, like a manipulation of the artistic temperament rather than an exploration of it.

The same can be said of the movie’s treatment of Pekar’s politics. A key episode involving Harvey’s televised harangue about the dangers of unchecked corporate privilege—a stunt that got him banned from NBC—is made to seem like it was borne out of depression and anger at Letterman rather than any genuine political orientation (“Corporations were having a laugh at my expense,” says the narration, though it could just as well be referring to school bullies). The left-leaning views with which many underground cartoonists, from Crumb down to Clowes, have defended alternative lifestyles and the working class are all but ignored.

In Masked and Anonymous, a recently released feature starring and co-written by Bob Dylan, TV stations are depicted as thinly-veiled fronts for government propaganda and decrepit California cities are lined with armed guards. The overall conceit of the film is that there’s little difference between the present day United States and a military dictatorship; politically, its one of the boldest American movies to attract big stars and widespread distribution in years.

Yet the majority of critics haven’t even bothered reporting on the messages of Masked and Anonymous, writing it off as a confused mess. From most conventional viewpoints, they’re right: the metaphors aren’t immediately obvious, the plot meanders and all the characters speak in a purple prose that sounds like Dylan lyrics. If you regard the movie as a feature-length Bob Dylan song, however, it seems like something more ambitious than most other recent movies. The dialogue may be silly and the images obtuse, but it adds up to a portrait of contemporary America that you feel in your gut before you can fully articulate it. I’m not saying that it’s a better movie than American Splendor, but it proposes something of a new cinematic form, for better or worse.