The first major biography of Martin Scorsese, America’s greatest modern filmmaker, a book as stylish and audacious as the director’s movies, drawing on previously unseen sources, original research, and new interviews to reveal the origins, genius, and influence of his life and work

Just a Shot Away chronicles the brilliant and tumultuous life and career of Martin Scorsese, one of the world’s foremost living filmmakers, from his childhood on the violent streets of mid-century Little Italy, recreated in unprecedented detail, to his tectonic contributions to the cinema of the New Hollywood and beyond. The making of such masterpieces as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Waltz are explored here in revelatory depth, along with undersung favorites like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and After Hours.

With new sources and interviews, Mark Binelli conjures Scorsese’s asthmatic boyhood, spent memorizing movies and watching wiseguys. He traces the earliest steps out of Little Italy and into filmmaking, marriage, and the halting path to recognition, which, when it came, coincided with a personal life spiraling out of control. Previously untold fly-on-the-wall accounts detail wild stories of cocaine-fueled days and nights jetting to international film festivals and hunkered down behind the blacked-out windows of the director’s infamous Mulholland Drive bachelor pad (shared with Robbie Robertson of The Band). Yet Scorsese rebounded with a career that itself serves as a pocket history of the more than half-century of Hollywood he’s traversed, making classics decade after decade in a startling array of genres and for nearly every major studio.

Through deep archival research, interviews with dozens of friends and collaborators, and access to a trove of previously undiscovered material, including firsthand accounts from Scorsese, his parents, Robertson, Robert De Niro, and ex-wife Isabella Rossellini, Just a Shot Away dynamically recasts the life of the master filmmaker with brio and the headlong, form-shattering dynamism of one of its subject’s own indelible pictures.