Not for his haters or his superfans, this Woody Allen biography is for the rest of us

It’s certainly possible to not have an opinion about Woody Allen at this point, but it would take some work. Did he molest his adopted daughter, Dylan (as she claims), or did his former partner, Mia Farrow, coach Dylan into smearing Allen? Is it really OK to woo (and eventually wed) the teenage girl whom your partner (Farrow again) adopted and whose Sweet 16 party you attended? Or is that just textbook grooming?

(Harper)

Patrick McGilligan’s exhaustive biography “Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham” addresses such questions, though it would be a stretch to say it weighs in on them. To the extent that it does, it places a thumb on the scale in favor of the subject to which it devotes some 848 pages.

McGilligan writes that Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi Previn “raised puritanical eyebrows,” as if anyone who objected to such behavior was stuck in some outdated bourgeois rut. He treats Allen’s ’70s trysts with teenage girls as a sign of the times. (The author also trots out queasy phrases like “the Woke Generation” in a way that suggests he’d like you to get off his lawn.) He spends a lot of time writing about how long Farrow breastfed the son she had with Allen, Satchel Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow (who would grow up to be a spokesman for Dylan and Farrow and a leading journalist of the #MeToo movement). At such moments the book grows rather strange, though its overall dissection of the immensely dysfunctional Allen/Farrow family is both finely detailed and deeply sad.

Once you get past the sordid stuff — if you can get past it enough to pick up the book in the first place — you’ll find an engaged, engaging and tirelessly insightful account of Allen’s life and career, from a writer who has few peers in the film biography business. McGilligan, whose previous subjects include Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, is a professional biographer, a document digger who knows how to use an artist’s life to reflect on his or her body of work, and vice versa. He writes with authority and wit on the highlights of Allen’s career (“Annie Hall,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors”), and he’s blessedly brief on later trifles like “Small Time Crooks,” “Hollywood Ending” and “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” which, among others, made it clear that a new Woody Allen movie could be cause for as much disappointment as excitement.

McGilligan is particularly strong on Allen’s showbiz beginnings, or, as he writes, his “crucial development from a neophyte TV writer to a knock-kneed stand-up comic with a zany, neurotic persona.” His ascent was indeed remarkable. Allen began submitting gags to newspaper columnists as a high school student, used that work to break into the television writing business, picked up mentors including Neil Simon’s older brother, Danny, and eventually met the two men who would, slowly, launch him into stardom. Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe saw a stand-up comedian in Allen well before Allen himself did; as his personal managers they pushed him into duty in New York comedy clubs.

He initially floundered, clueless in matters of connecting with audiences and sustaining a performance, but found his footing as a digressive, less-topical, self-deprecating Mort Sahl type. Though even Allen admits his brand of intellectualism is pretty superficial — he never had much use for or interest in college — he crafted the Allen persona we would come to know, a stammering, angsty nebbish, terrified by the inevitability of death, quick to drop a reference to Sartre or Joyce into a comedic context.

Not surprisingly, given his cinema bona fides, McGilligan handles Allen’s development as a filmmaker with keen insight. He digs deep into Allen’s collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis, dubbed “The Prince of Darkness” due to his fondness for deep pools of shadow. Like Allen, Willis was a New York outsider. McGilligan writes: “Both boasted tireless work ethics and stubbornly avoided any ‘fooling around’ during filming. Both despised cinematic cliches.” Their first collaboration, on Allen’s masterpiece “Annie Hall,” was particularly fruitful. In the words of the movie’s star Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar (and started a casual fashion craze) for playing the free-spirited title character, Willis showed Allen how a master shot “could be used to deliver the variety and impact an audience needed without cutting to close-ups.”

Willis worked on seven more Allen movies, but “Annie Hall” remains the director’s most visually alive and imaginative creation. When both director and movie won Oscars, Allen famously stayed in New York, playing clarinet at Michael’s Pub, instead of attending the ceremony.

Unlike Eric Lax’s 1991 “Woody Allen: A Biography,” which was celebratory if not terribly inquisitive, McGilligan’s book is unauthorized. This means McGilligan had nobody and nothing to answer to but himself and the truth. As we have learned, however, the truth about Woody Allen can be elusive, which was the case even before the fog that surrounds his various scandals descended. Not for nothing did Variety dub him “Mr. Secretive.” All the more impressive, then, that McGilligan was able to piece together what he has here. This isn’t the takedown that Allen foes might have wanted, but nor is it hagiography. It is, for the time being, the definitive study of a man and an artist about whom it remains hard to be neutral.

Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer.