It's impossible to overstate the impact François Truffaut's The 400 Blows has had since its release in 1959: It not only launched one of the greatest careers in film history; it launched several. As an impudent young critic for Cahiers du Cinema and Arts-Lettres-Spectacles, Truffaut regularly scolded the complacent French filmmaking establishment, instead championing such American genre masters as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford. When an opportunistic marriage to a producer's daughter allowed him to get The 400 Blows financed, its deeply personal mix of childhood trauma and freewheeling technique struck a chord. Soon thereafter, many of his colleagues at Cahiers—including Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—followed his lead and the Nouvelle Vague quickly overshadowed the old guard. Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana's reverent biography, Truffaut, lacks critical insight and stylistic finesse, but it's a scholarly and revealing look at the great director's turbulent life. Assembled from a massive archive of interviews, notes, and correspondence, the book makes a convincing argument that the child was the father of the man. While Truffaut's troubled youth directly informed The 400 Blows, The Wild Child (1970), and Small Change (1976), his resulting melancholy underlies all his work, including more whimsical films such as Stolen Kisses (1968) or 1960's genre-jumping classic Shoot The Piano Player. When the press seized on the autobiographical elements in his debut, Truffaut's parents derided their son's "hypocrisy" and "careerism"; his lengthy response—an urgent, emotionally raw letter addressed to his father—stands as the most affecting passage in the book. But current Cahiers editors de Bacque and Toubiana add little color to the existing record, and their accounts of his work are perfunctory at best. Though well-researched and organized, Truffaut reads like a solid outline for a much better biography.