No offense to the very able Brian Kellow, author of the first Pauline Kael biography, but the most famous and influential movie critic ever wouldn’t have welcomed his book “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” with open arms.

Kael didn’t want anyone to write her biography, not even herself. Apparently she took the same approach Oscar Wilde did to criticism, believing all of it, whether high or low, to be a mode of autobiography.

“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs,” Kael wrote in the introduction to her 1994 anthology “For Keeps,” a compilation of her 30-year reviewing history, squashed into 1,291 seductive pages. “I think I have.”

Kael’s heart was already on the New Yorker’s sleeve in the form of her emotional responses to film. Why would anyone need to know whom she slept with or what she did in the rare moments when she wasn’t seeing or thinking about a movie or what position she wrote in? I can’t argue that I needed to know any of these things, but I enjoyed learning the answers, taking particular and peculiar pleasure to the last in that list (standing up, swilling Wild Turkey).

That was just one of many details Kellow pulled from a long, although not complete, list of sources for his account of a Petaluma, Calif., chicken rancher’s daughter and University of California-Berkeley graduate whose belief in film carried her from pay-nothing gigs at a radio station to the critical catbird’s seat and the eventual authorship of a dozen books about movies.

A full biography was inevitable. Not necessarily because the life story of a movie critic is of vast general interest but because a writer who influences multiple generations of other writers will be envied and adored by writers. This typically vaults a person into being a subject writers long to cover, regardless of whether anyone who isn’t a writer will want to read it.

I have no sense of whether “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” will find wide readership, mainly because I’m so hideously biased on the topic. I would not be a movie critic if I hadn’t read her as a child, so naturally I fell on Kellow’s book like a teenage girl on a lost volume of the “Twilight” saga and found it riveting.

True movie lovers and anyone else who makes a living reviewing film — or barely makes a living doing so, like Kael, who didn’t make it to the New Yorker until she was 48 — are likely to do the same.

Critics old enough to have been berated by Kael at some point in their career (there are plenty of those) might be inclined to take a pass, unless they want to see if Kellow quoted them. He interviewed many of her sparring partners, including Andrew Sarris. “She was always on the boil,” Sarris says, before calling her “unthreatening.” I’d advise Sarris to turn to page 127 to read an excerpt from director George Roy Hill’s letter to Kael calling her a “miserable bitch.” He sounds threatened. As for Sam Peckinpah, he sounds downright whipped.

Kellow, the features editor at Opera News and author of a biography of Ethel Merman, is himself a fanboy, although he never got a chance to be one of the “Paulettes,” the name critic Richard Corliss gave to Kael’s clutch of young admirers. Kellow’s love and respect for Kael’s brilliance — as a middle schooler he could quote from her reviews — is evident throughout the biography, but he’s no drooling devotee.

If anything, his book tends to the skeptical. There’s a thoroughly depressing account of Kael helping herself to the research of an assistant professor at UCLA for her lengthy Orson Welles essay “Raising Kane” without giving him proper credit. We also get wicked tales of her hindering employment prospects of other critics and fulminating over longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn’s decadelong insistence on splitting critic’s duties between Kael and Penelope Gilliatt (who also managed to combine drinking and writing, but with less humor).

Kellow paints a convincing picture of Kael as a hyperbole queen too involved in the fortunes of movies and individual filmmakers, not corrupted by money or personal gain, but by a passion for individuals and her conviction that she was always right.

This led to what most journalists would consider a breach of ethics, writing about movies written or directed by friends. Furthermore, he’s shaped the book with a narrative arc that shows the peaks and valleys of Kael’s career following much the same path as cinema history, coming into first bloom in the era of Jean-Luc Godard and “Bonnie and Clyde,” flourishing with Robert Altman (perhaps her most beloved filmmaker) and then falling off in the ’80s.

His compression of that history is tidy and compelling, but constraining her within it seems facile and reducing of a professional 10 years departed, 20 years retired, who still knows no equal or even close contender.

There are mentions of Kael’s apparently well-known generosity and sense of fun, but not that many illustrations of such. I wonder how the book might have been different if Kael’s only child, Gina James, had not declined to participate. I came away from “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” somewhat downcast over what I’d learned about Kael’s methods but still curious as to how this woman managed to make such a remarkable career for herself while raising a child alone. Kellow’s is a fine biography, but there is still room to go deeper into the life of the critic who dove so deep into the movies.