Robert Crumb built his reputation on Zap Comix and the underground comics movement he helped launch in San Francisco, but this film catches him talking on camera about the parts of his life the comics only hint at. He describes a childhood with a Marine father and a Catholic school education, his start drawing greeting cards in Cleveland, and the 1965 acid trip that pushed him toward the counterculture. He talks through the fame that followed, his confusion at being treated as a spokesman for a Sixties scene he watched fall apart, and a 1973 nervous breakdown brought on by loneliness and his own tangled obsessions with women. His brothers and his second wife, Aline Kominsky, appear alongside him, and Kominsky in particular emerges as the person who steadied his life and became his collaborator in art. The interviews sit close to Crumb's face for long stretches, letting him work through material he clearly finds uncomfortable, and the film never softens what he says about himself.