There are interviews with several of the artist's ex-girlfriends, usually while Crumb himself is awkwardly, uncomfortably sitting nearby, and candid conversations with his first wife Dana and their son Jesse.
There is, of course, a great deal of time spent in the company of Crumb himself, watching him draw, walk the streets and people-watch, or interact with his wife (and sometimes collaborator) Aline Kominsky-Crumb and their daughter Sophie (who has since grown up to be a cartoonist herself). There are interviews with art critics and fellow cartoonists who have various wildly contradictory perspectives on what Crumb is doing with his art. He seems to be circling around his subject, trying to see him from as many angles as possible. Zwigoff never flinches away from Crumb or his disturbing, complicated art. Zwigoff is a sympathetic but relatively objective biographer, clearly fascinated by Crumb's art and yet also in some sense grappling with it, trying to understand it and the man behind it, with all of his contradictions and openly unpleasant characteristics. Why make a film about a man who has essentially poured his deepest, darkest thoughts and most potentially incriminating ideas out onto the page, then published it all for anyone to see? And yet Terry Zwigoff's remarkable documentary Crumb manages to be startling and revelatory even for those intimately familiar with its subject's body of work.
It might be expected, with such an unrepressed and confessional artist, that there would be nothing left to document. His work is both thought-provoking and queasiness-inducing. There are few artists in comics who draw as well as Crumb - as realistically or as expressively - and there are few whose subject matter is so frequently off-putting and offensive. His work is a catalog of his often grotesque and horrifying obsessions, his fetishized sexuality, his broad misanthropic tendencies, his ranting intolerance for most of his fellow humans, his rage and depression and ugly emotions. And yet his work is simultaneously a challenge to the very concept of good taste Crumb could always be counted on to draw and write about the things that no one else would even think, or if they did, that they would never dare to let out in public. His work is inescapable for those interested in all sorts of strains within modern comics: he popularized autobiographical storytelling, particularly of the nakedly confessional kind he was a driving force behind the development of underground, independently published books he influenced several entire generations of cartoonists with his combination of pristine draftsmanship and an untethered id, fearlessly exploring sexuality and perversions of all kinds alongside pointed political and social satires. He is a central figure to the artform as it has developed in the last fifty years arguably, he is the central figure without whom comics would not have developed in quite the same way that they have.
There is no artist in comics more confounding and fascinating than Robert Crumb.