The only thing that could have been better than Sam Wasson's page-turning, comprehensively rendered biography of choreographer-director Bob Fosse would have been Fosse's own memoir.

And one imagines that Fosse, had he not died suddenly of a heart attack at age 60 in 1987, would have loved the chance to unfurl his storytelling chops given how much he coveted and envied literary talent.

But then, even close friends of Fosse's such as screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and novelist E.L. Doctorow would have found it challenging to create a character as vivid, complex, charming, magnetic and exasperating as this lithe, limber fellow with big ideas and bigger dreams.

At nearly 600 pages, Fosse is certainly big, if not lithe. And Wasson's own narrative style has a jazzy, discursive and relentless energy well aligned with its subject.

Born in Chicago, Robert Louis Fosse grew up during the Depression suffering from both asthma and epilepsy, yet was nonetheless a dance prodigy who started taking hoofing lessons at age 9 and was a seasoned burlesque veteran by high school. Though he never became a leading man like his idols Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, Fosse rapidly accumulated credibility and credentials as a dancer on stage (1953's Kiss Me Kate) and screen (1955's My Sister Eileen) before being tapped to choreograph such 1950s Broadway classics as The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees.

In the 1960s, he picked up more awards and acclaim for his choreography on such hits as How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Little Me and Sweet Charity, a star vehicle for his wife, muse and collaborator Gwen Verdon, who married him in 1960 and to whom he would remain married for the rest of his life despite numerous affairs.

Fosse's romantic life was in some ways the least complicated thing about him. Wasson's portrait is that of a supremely insecure and conflicted man who, despite his recognition as an influential artist, always thought of himself in relatively diminished terms; at best, his self-image was that of a burlesque hustler who got by with what's characterized in his musical, Chicago, as the "old razzle-dazzle."

But "razzle-dazzle" alone couldn't account for Fosse creating a swaggering, slithering and sexually allusive dance style that, as Wasson says of one of Fosse's dancers, "looked like jazz sounded." Nor could it diminish Fosse's singular 1972 trifecta of winning in the same year an Emmy (Liza with a Z), a Tony (Pippin) and an Oscar (Cabaret) for directing.

This unprecedented — and thus far unequaled — achievement was followed, Wasson writes, "with the most terrible depression of his life," because all success seemed to do was raise the stakes, increase the pressure and make it harder for Fosse to please everybody. So there would be more smoking, more pills, more booze, more risk, more anxiety.

Inexplicable as all that sounds, Fosse's turbulent mood swings and behavioral tics are part of the riveting show Wasson stages here. Without these manic attributes, the world likely wouldn't have received all the aforementioned glories as well as such dark, disparate films as Lenny (1974), Star 80 (1983) and the semi-autobiographical tour de force, All That Jazz (1979).

The latter hints at what this biography affirms: That Bob Fosse's heart, as much as it betrayed him in the end, was bigger than he often believed it to be.