"Ghost World"

I watched "Ghost World" in a crowded Manhattan theater where the audience started laughing the first time Buscemi shambles into the fake '50s diner and didn't stop for 30 seconds or so. It was annoying, in-the-know New York behavior, but I could kind of understand it: It was laughter of recognition, not ridicule. The defeated but not quite hopeless Seymour is definitely a role Buscemi was born to play; he inhabits the character's baggy, styleless wardrobe, his apartment cluttered with vintage crap of all kinds and his hangdog expression with a ruthlessness born of understanding. Seymour has given his life to a set of obsessions he's no longer sure are noble; he might be willing to trade in his patented eccentricities for a normal life if there was anything about a normal life he could stand.

Seymour basically grosses out Rebecca, who has no difficulty attracting attention from supposedly normal guys, but Enid immediately recognizes him as a kindred soul. "He's the exact opposite of everything I completely hate," she says with a kind of wonder. Of course, the things Enid completely hates make up an awful lot of the world, from her dad's annoying girlfriend (Teri Garr in a cameo role) to smiley-face retail culture to pretentious Euro-art movies (we overhear a hilarious trailer for something called "The Flower That Drank the Moon") to "upbeat, extroverted pseudo-bohemians." Certainly the miserable, misanthropic Seymour, with his collections of 78 records and early-20th century advertising posters, fits none of these categories.

But Seymour is also stuck in middle age with no girlfriend and a middle-management job in the corporate office of a fried-chicken chain. Enid vows to get him a date, brightly suggesting that all they need to do is find somebody who shares his interests. "I don't want to meet somebody who shares my interests," Seymour grumbles. "I hate my interests!" Whatever label you might want to put on Enid and Seymour's budding quasi-relationship, it captures marvelously a particular kind of ambiguous real-life situation you hardly ever find in the movies. The two never talk about what is or isn't happening between them, or about the idea that it might seem weird for a guy in his 40s and an 18-year-old girl to hang out all the time.

To Enid's surprise, she actually succeeds in setting up Seymour with an age-appropriate real estate agent (Stacey Travis), who starts buying him antiques and stonewashed jeans. Abruptly, she finds herself cut off from both Seymour and Rebecca, as well as pilloried at the art show for her appropriation of one of Seymour's racist advertising cartoons. (This subplot, which seems to have dropped by from Spike Lee's "Bamboozled," is by far the clumsiest aspect of "Ghost World.") Enid wages a furious and perhaps destructive campaign to win back Seymour and to rescue her friendship with Rebecca, but Clowes and Zwigoff, to their credit, aren't interested in a romantic comedy whose oddball characters finally adapt themselves to bourgeois existence. The magic of "Ghost World" doesn't lie in its resolution -- it doesn't offer any. Instead it lies in its brittle, hilarious dialogue and the raw places beneath it (I've resisted quoting more of the jokes, since you really need to hear them for yourself) and in its lingering images of a girl, lonely and misunderstood (not least of all by herself), wandering the boulevards of Los Angeles with the lights of Winchell's and Radio Shack behind her.

No one who saw "American Beauty" will be surprised by Birch's measured, commanding performance as a character whose arrogance can't hide the fact that she couldn't possibly be less sure of herself. Maybe the real surprise here is the sudden emergence of Zwigoff as an accomplished narrative filmmaker. Until now he had been known as an eccentric perfectionist who had made just two documentaries in 15 years: "Louie Bluie" in 1985 and "Crumb" in 1994. Certainly the latter film had some of the qualities that make "Ghost World" so memorable: a blend of cultural satire and visual poetry, along with a profound fellow feeling for obsessives, compulsives and maladjusted searchers for authenticity. Zwigoff knows that the Seymours and Enids of the world are capable not only of surviving but of thriving. He also knows how long their search is likely to be.

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