CRUMB

This remarkable documentary by Zwigoff (GHOST WORLD, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL) about the multi-talented comic book artist Robert Crumb, whom art critic Robert Hughes memorably called “the Breughel of the 20th century,” is at once darkly funny, distressingly frank and forever haunting. As we come to know the prodigiously talented, sex-obsessed Crumb and his troubled family, our thinking about art, artists, and our culture gets a bracing jolt. Focusing on Crumb’s seminal work in the ’60s and ’70s, the film is essential viewing for visitors to the Portland Art Museum’s exhibition The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, on view through September 19. “It succeeds at showing how one man’s psychic wounds contributed to an art that transmutes personal pain into garish visual satire.”—New York Times.

$9 general, $8 students and seniors.

Whitsell Auditorium