LET 'EM EAT CRUMB

By RICHARD CORLISS

ASK ROBERT CRUMB'S WIVES AND girlfriends about the Brueghel of underground comics, and they'll say he's morose, withdrawn, almost socially autistic. Crumb agrees, and adds wryly, "That's why I'm such an exciting subject for a movie."

Well, he is. He's the subject of a spooky spellbinder called Crumb. With all due respect to Hoop Dreams, and with none to the inbred documentary-screening-committee clan of the Motion Picture Academy, which handed this year's Oscar to a former chair of that committee, Crumb is the one that should've won.

For director Terry Zwigoff, an old friend, Crumb and his family sit for an unvarnished portrait of an artist whose comic strips reveal modern man at his most screwed up. Slouching through celebrity life with the same gravity-defying posture as the guy in his famous "Keep On Truckin'" cartoon, Crumb presents no apologies or explanations for his work. "Maybe I should be locked up," he says, "and my pencils taken away from me."

Growing up in Philadelphia, in a family that mocked the fantasy life of '50s sitcoms, Robert was the anti-Beaver, the original geeky guy. At 17 Crumb wrote a Valentine to himself that reads like the pracis for a Dostoyevsky tale: "Girls are just utterly out of my reach. They won't even let me draw them." He became a cult sensation--and got lots of girls--by drawing them as monuments to his awe and fear of women. They are mammoth fertility totems; they dare the cringing Crumb cartoon male to deify or defile them. In his work Crumb does both, which has earned him no end of scorn from people with protective sensibilities.

Then we meet Crumb's brothers Charles and Max, and we realize with a shudder that Robert is the normal one. Charles was the one who encouraged--forced, really--Robert to draw. Gradually Charles' own comics became choked with words, rantings in a minute hand. For 30 years now he has hardly left his mother's house. Max eats string, sits on a bed of nails, then goes begging. He felt that his elder brothers never encouraged him to create art. He finally did, saw that it was good, and had an epileptic seizure.

How can one react to this apocalyptic rubble of a '50s childhood--or to the sexual atrocities limned in Crumb's work? With the only two reactions that modern life demands: a laugh or a scream. The title on one page of a Crumb sketchbook reads, "Words Fail Me (Pictures Aren't Much Better)." But pictures allow Crumb to tell his own truth. To him, as to any artist who ascends deep into the bizarre, his work looks like reality. With care and wit, he draws his own demons and goddesses. One thing he never draws is conclusions. That is for the viewer to do, and be horrified or edified.

Or to declare, as Charles did to any of Robert's enthusiasms, "How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure." Irony aside, that's how to respond to this magnificent study in ink and blood.