My learned laptop, Pow R. Book, defines the graphic novel as "a fictional story for adults published in the form of a comic book." And while I'm loathe to disagree with anything that spends that much time warming my thighs, it's more efficient in this hectic epoch to just call ‘em storyboards. If you've ever thumbed through the source material for movies as varied as "Ghost World," "300," or even "Road To Perdition," many of the panels hit the screen shockingly intact, the artist's original vision uncompromised.

Arguably none have survived the jump more successfully - or perhaps with more defiance - than Marjane Satrapi's four volumes of "Persepolis," her firsthand account of an Iranian childhood spent in the oppressive shadow of the Islamic Revolution. Co-directed by Satrapi and French animator Vincent Paronnaud, the stirring, gorgeous cartoon that is "Persepolis" structures its story in flashback, with grown-up Marjane recalling the sad, funny turns taken during her lifelong journey from Tehran to Paris, with a coming-of-age layover in Vienna.

Animated in luminous blacks and whites, "Persepolis" opens in 1978, with Iranians anticipating halcyon days following the disposition of the Shah but instead gathering the true meaning of the phrase "lesser evil." Eight-year-old Marjane - the round-faced Bruce Lee fanatic is drawn like the result of a ménage a quatre between Charlie Brown and the Powerpuff Girls - is a sponge, absorbing the views of her progressive relatives, especially her beloved Uncle Anoush (he totally resembles Dashiell Hammett). The switch to the misogyny of the Ayatollah's fundamentalism is especially tough on young Marjane, who is surrounded by formidable free-thinkers in her mother and grandmother, voiced by Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux, who's played Deneuve's mother in four previous films over an equal number of decades, most recently Ozon's "8 Women."

Deneuve's daughter Chiara Mastroianni provides the pipes for teenage Marjane, whose parents send her to school in Vienna to shield her from Saddam's increasing hostilities towards Iran. It's a tradeoff, though, as her cultural identity begins to fade with the introduction of the new ideas and the unbridled freedoms of the West. And when failed relationships, the guilt over "a safe, frivolous life," and a subtly referenced assault cause her to hightail it back to the structured tyranny of Tehran, Marjane tries to harness her feisty enlightenment into the restraints of marriage, as well as art instruction, where the life-drawing subjects are, naturally, shrouded in a chador ("But it's the same from every angle!" she wails).

The particulars are always different, but the coming-of-age part generally occurs when you realize, if I may channel your mom, that the world does not revolve around you. Satrapi doesn't shrink from depicting her own selfishness, as evidenced by one scene where her grandma minces no words after Marjane offers some poor galoot up to the authorities rather than take the heat for wearing makeup. And while it remains to be seen what this fledgling filmmaker can do with a story that isn't her own, the ultimate "praise" for a talented rebel comes from her homeland, where they object to her "unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution."

Putting the qualifier "cult" before "classic" gives a film oodles of leeway in terms of quality, which means that 1976's "The Man Who Fell To Earth," directed by British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg, is campy chaos, redeemed by a beautiful David Bowie as an ethereal alien trying to get back home, and Buck Henry as his fascinatingly underdeveloped and myopic agent. (Candy Clark, the bubbly blonde from "American Graffiti," is a tiresome banshee.) Anyway, I'm only mentioning the film so I can pen a quick mash note to novelist Jonathan Lethem.

Dear Mr. Lethem: A well-informed little bird told me that in addition to your Saturday presentation of Nicholas Ray's "Bigger Than Life," you'll also introduce Friday's "The Man Who Fell To Earth." I'm currently reading your novel "The Fortress of Solitude" (loved "Motherless Brooklyn"), but I've become so obsessed with dissecting your yummy wordsmithery that it's taken me a month. Also, I paused to plow through the new Michael Chabon. I didn't think you'd mind. Love, Dayna.