By Dan Brown

The movie version of Chester Brown’s Paying For It is a well-crafted, warm, funny film.

If you’re a fan of Canadian graphic novels, as I am, you should see it.

The best part is Ottawa-born actor Dan Beirne’s portrayal of Chester, the cartoonist who seeks out sex workers after he gets dumped by his girlfriend.

In real life, the dumper was one-time MuchMusic VJ Sook Yin-Lee, who directed the adaptation. Where the book focuses on Chester, the movie gives equal airtime to Lee’s side of the story, although on the big screen her character’s name is Sonny.

You may know Brown as one-third of the Toronto cartoonist troika that also included Seth and the late Joe Matt.

Brown is widely known for his graphic-novel history of Louis Riel. Paying For It (the graphic novel) came out in 2011 and relates his search for sex without any strings attached, which he finds with the city’s prostitutes.

It’s one of those personal stories that typify the autobiographical Canadian graphic novel school of cartooning.

I think it’s fair to say Brown wrote Paying For It to demystify sex work and johns. The book’s happy ending occurs when Brown finds one particular sex worker to patronize exclusively, eventually working out an arrangement in which he is her only customer. 

So yeah, it’s not the same old love story. 

“Romantic love is bullshit, and I’m not wasting any more time chasing it,” Beirne-as-Brown tells his friends.

I saw Paying For It when it played in London for less than a week earlier this year. The good news is you don’t need to rush to a theatre because there’s no real reason to see it on the big screen. Seek it out when it comes to TV or streaming.

Granted, Lee has some amazing compositions – the opening shot of Beirne at the drawing table is patterned after a 1668 Johannes Vermeer oil painting – but otherwise it’s not an overtly cinematic piece. Its strength lies elsewhere.

I would never have picked Beirne to play Chester Brown. Clearly, Lee understood he could nail the shy comic creator, holding the whole movie together with his nebbish charm.

He goes through his many encounters with sex workers with a kind of refreshing earnestness, an eager naif who wants to decode the mysteries of how to be a paying client,

His circle of friends includes three other Toronto cartoonists who meet regularly to chat. There’s a lot of humour that comes from Brown’s attempts to explain his prostitution journey to his pals.

The movie also does a really good job of evoking 1990s Toronto. 

Lee filmed scenes in the same apartment where she and Chester lived together, so you can’t get more authentic than that. Sonny, her stand-in, works for MaxMusic, which is run by an annoying/inspiring entrepreneur who is a lot like Moses Znaimer.

The only element that seems missing is, although there is one scene of the aftermath of police violence on a sex worker’s apartment, we don’t see much of them outside Chester’s visits. As a viewer, I wanted to know more about their lives when they’re off the clock. 

I won’t spoil the ending too much, but a sad event momentarily reunites Chester and Sonny, bringing them full-circle – they are no longer the people they were at the start of the film, even if they still care for each other..

If Canadian graphic novels are your thing, you should check it out. 

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.