Funny Pages

Few films have the moxie to have their lead character be not simply flawed but remorselessly, consistently annoying: fewer still when that lead is arguably the closest thing to an immediately identifiable character. So it is with Funny Pages and its protagonist, Daniel Zolghadri as rising young artist Robert – rising right up his own ass, that is.

Although "protagonist" is the wrong word, because few characters are as quickly antagonizing as Robert. A talented illustrator with the wrong influences, he's the kind of comic fan who'll scoff at Marvel and DC while waxing lyrical about the linework in a Tijuana bible, or accuse his only friend, Miles (Emanuel), of ripping off Beanworld. Probably the only reason this slacker Holden Caulfield doesn't call people "phonies" is because he'd think that was passé. He's looking for some kind of artistic purity and he feels like he finds it in Wallace (Maher), a former color separator for Image Comics.

It's a rare major part for veteran character actor Maher (most recently famous as Black Pete in Our Flag Means Death), who finally intrudes into the story once Robert has already impressively screwed up his life. Dysfunctional and deeply selfish, he's simultaneously unwilling to have Robert's puppy dog eyes on him and willing to take advantage of this misplaced hero worship. All the while, he's the walking embodiment of the seething self-loathing that seeps through every frame.

First-time director Kline has an eye for the kind of faces that prior directors have spotted for how they embrace their bulbous, sagging, protruding weirdness: Like Stephen Adly Guirgis from Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Todd Solondz's Palindromes, as Robert's high school art teacher, Mr. Katano, whose untimely death is what finally motivates his student to go off and embrace the whole "starving artist in a garret" myth. Only it's not really a garret, but a converted boiler room in a basement in Trenton run as a sweaty doss-house by the friendly but creepy Barry (Wright), who sits around in his underwear watching movies that a friend has burned to CD-ROM for him.

It's a de-romanticized version of another trip into underground comics, Terry Zwigoff's oddly glossy 2001 adaptation of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, in which Thora Birch's studiously disaffected goth latches on to Steve Buscemi's nerdy record collector. But there's no gloss here as Kline revels in the gross physicality of his characters: Barry's sweatiness, Miles' acne, Wallace's cleft lip, and the bedraggled Larry Fine everything of Mitchell Wenig (instantly recognizable as one of the debt-settling siblings from Uncut Gems, directed by producing duo the Safdie brothers).

It's all deliberately grotesque, but comic readers will be pleasantly surprised at the degree of compassion for and comprehension of the culture Kline portrays. The circa millennium setting puts Funny Pages in that moment when a new snobbery was born around high-end reprints of alternative comics, while the selection of Image (always the industry's "other guy") and color separator (the lowest of the low) are Easter eggs that add richness to this tale of teen pomposity.