Tears of a clown

Nathan Rabin, film critic for the satirical newspaper The Onion and the author of “The Big Rewind,’’ had one of those in spades, but cannot summon the focus to touch its depths. Or maybe he chooses not to; a confirmed joker, Rabin prefers to play his own back pages for laughs. Just call it the stand-up memoir: Take my life - please.

The facts, as presented, are bleak: Rabin’s father divorces his stepmother and quits a stable bureaucratic job when the boy is 12. The family sputters in the direction of middle-class poverty (food stamps, the author notes, are “awesome’’) before coming entirely unglued. Stricken with multiple sclerosis and dismayed at Nathan’s increasingly disruptive behavior, his father has him committed to a mental hospital, which Nathan refers to as Arkham Asylum (likely an allusion to the fictional institution in the Batman comics), where he spends several months as a teenager. His father’s illness and all-around inability to function means that even when Nathan is released, he is relegated to foster care, spending the bulk of his teenage years at “Winchester House,’’ a group home. “Nobody ever ended up at Winchester House,’’ Rabin wryly points out, “because their family was too wealthy or stable.’’ Winchester is nightmarish and formative, a guided tour of society’s forgotten children. It is also the closest thing to home that the teenaged Rabin knows.

It is here that we must interrupt Rabin’s narrative with an objection voiced by a former boss at The Onion: “That’s the problem with all your stories, Nathan: they begin really cute and end with you getting viciously beaten.’’ “The Big Rewind’’ is less interested in the vicious beatings, or the cuteness, than in the confluence of the two. Approaching his past, Rabin eschews the solemnity, the plodding parade of mishaps, that is often the purview of the therapeutic, cathartic memoirs to which “The Big Rewind’’ is ostensibly close kin. Instead, he delights in its delicious absurdity: “We were just told that Ezekiel was the scum of the earth,’’ he says of a child rapist who briefly resided at Winchester, “and we’d suddenly be spending a whole lot more time together.’’ As a storyteller, Rabin thrives on adversity; it provides him with the perfect backdrop for his sardonic, Shecky Greene asides. They give comedy the aura of heroism. Too much niceness reduces him to sputtering clichés like “it was a beacon of warmth and support.’’

The memoir is structured around and informed by his pop-culture obsessions - the things that kept him going. They are explicitly his closest kin: “Like an ideal family, our personal pantheon will never let us down.’’ More than anchoring the narrative, which they do only tangentially, these shoehorned bits of cultural ephemera serve to anchor Rabin’s position vis-à-vis his own story. Painfully aware of the mixed legacy (thank you, James Frey) of woe-is-me memoirs, Rabin is careful to emphasize that, like “Seinfeld,’’ there will be no lessons learned here, and no hugging. “Now if this were a Mitch Albom heart-tugger, Dwight’s geeky, easily mocked exterior would hide a noble soul and a treasure trove of hidden wisdom,’’ Rabin says of one nerdy group-home acquaintance. “Then someone would die and the cash registers inside my opportunistic mind would begin ch-chinging joyfully. But it’s not that kind of book.’’

There are no saviors in “The Big Rewind,’’ and no sudden epiphanies. Instead, there is acceptance of his father as flawed but charming. There is also a recognition of the importance of movies in his life, providing a solace that enabled him to burrow out from under his burdensome past. “Talking about movies freed me from my crippling self-consciousness. Movies were liberating. They made me feel alive and pointed to a wonderful world outside the group home where I could be whoever I wanted to be.’’ You’ll forgive him if, as a result, he takes movies very seriously. A critic to the bone, he panics when, a few years later, he accepts a ride home from a coworker: “I was terrified both by the possibility that I was being driven home by a guy who was drunk or high, and that I had put my life in the hands of someone who counts Nora Ephron among the all-time greats.’’

The last third of “The Big Rewind,’’ when Rabin arrives at The Onion, finds professional satisfaction, and sorts out the messy details of a complicated romantic life, seems the weakest section of the book. Does anyone want to read 100 pages on the life and death of a short-lived basic-cable, movie-review show? If so, write to me care of the Globe, and I can fill you in on all the details of Rabin’s spats with entertainment reporter Zorianna Kit on the set of AMC’s “Film Club with John Ridley.’’ In his utterly reasonable disdain for the genre to which he has contributed a better-than-average entry, Rabin has neglected its most essential rule: Bad-childhood memoirs end with the hero’s first glimpse of daylight. They do not, as a rule, end with a tryst with a polyamorous graduate student and a failed tryout for “Ebert & Roeper.’’

Saul Austerlitz is a regular contributor to the Globe.