CrumbTaboo-busting artist Robert Crumb compulsively explored the myriad drives, compulsions and excesses in human behaviour in his animated films and comics (most notoriously in the Ralph Bakshi-directed, 1972 film adaptation of his comic strip, Fritz the Cat, which was originally slapped with an X rating).
Crumb continued to produce provocative work, but the collapse of the counterculture led to his increasing alienation and separation from the commercial art world.
Zwigoff's documentary offers an intimate, sometimes confronting study of an eccentric and uniquely talented subject. The film also probes some of the fascinating dynamics at work in the tension between imagination and personality and between family history and self-actualisation.
