Crumb, filmed over a period of six years by director Terry Zwigoff, offers a yeasty overview of the development of Crumb’s art and the controversies that have surrounded its scabrously outrageous displays of sexual and racial fantasy. I’ll buy that, but what makes him such a brilliant and subversive pop satirist is how deeply that id is wired into America’s. A funhouse mirror held up to the obsessions and hypocrisies of postindustrial American life, Crumb’s work has often been described as an explosion of his own id. Natural, Flakey Foont, and the laid-back hipster strutters of his famous ”Keep on Truckin”’ panel. In his cartoons, Crumb, like some comic-book synthesis of Lewis Carroll, Henry Miller, and Howard Stern, creates an acidhead dreamscape, a place where delectable big-butted superwomen rub up against downhome archetypes like Mr. A portrait of the artist as misanthrope, as bad-boy visionary, as joker and sex maniac and, finally, as hero, this is one of those rare film experiences that has the giddy effect of being a nightmare and a party at the same time.
That’s the feeling you get, as well, from CRUMB (Sony Pictures Classics, R), the extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb’s twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art. Crumb, you get the ticklish sensation that you’re seeing the world in all its tawdry grunge and desire-and that it’s dissolving to madness right before your eyes.
When you look at the work of the legendary underground cartoonist R.
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