For the past decade, Nathan Rabin has made a name for himself as the prolific, foul-mouthed, endlessly excitable head writer of The Onion’s entertainment section, The A.V. Club. He writes omnivorously about every kind of culture under the sun and in addition to straitlaced interviews and reviews, he has penned beloved columns like “My Year of Flops” and “Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club,” which manage to be as frequently perceptive as they are uproarious.

With The Big Rewind, his first book, Rabin turns his trademark acerbic wit back on his own life, a tumultuous journey involving group homes, absentee parents, mental hospitals, polyamorist girlfriends, Topher Grace’s vomit and short-lived cable TV shows. But his is ultimately a redemptive story: The pop culture that originally provided Rabin with much-needed escapes from reality became a hobby, then an obsession and finally a career.

On the whole, The Big Rewind is a wildly uneven memoir — even a frequent failure. The book could have benefited from a little more of the intentionally narrow focus that, say, a film review demands. Give Rabin 2,000 words on The Love Guru and he’s a pyrotechnic delight; give him 80,000-plus on everything he can conjure from his 33 years on this Earth and he’s all over the place.

Rabin’s life began its unpredictable zigzag early, when his father abruptly quit his cushy government job in suburban Wisconsin and took off with Rabin and his sister to Chicago. Despite having a this-is-my-future cultural epiphany while watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Rabin’s social and academic failings eventually got the best of him — until one night, in a half-baked cry for help, he swallowed an entire packet of caffeine pills. It wasn’t nearly enough to kill him, but a month later, his father had him committed to a mental hospital.

His stay in the asylum was short — he was given the boot once his father’s health insurance ran out — but from there Rabin would see his dad only sporadically. Instead, he bounded from a yuppie foster family, to six long years in a group home, to a stint in a filthy co-op at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Along the way he fell in with the original Onion crowd, where it was love at first sight (at least from his end) and he bumbled his way through a series of unsteady relationships.

The memoir’s first problem is logistical: Rabin simply has far too much material to fit into a book this size. As a result, many of the early chapters feel rushed, with dozens of minor characters introduced, given one or two brief moments to shine and then discarded. There’s very little actual storytelling in the first half. It’s obvious Rabin includes these peripheral figures because they genuinely matter to him, but too often it comes across as caricature.

The other major shortcoming is, surprisingly, the pop-culture springboards that open each chapter and which sound so tantalizing on the book jacket. Aside from maybe Nick Hornby and Chuck Klosterman, Rabin has done more than any other working critic to show the permanent, character-defining marks pop culture can leave on its consumers. Yet here, where art and biography should most easily intertwine, it never quite comes together.

When he slows down and really hones in on his subject, as in the truly heart-wrenching chapter on his absentee mother, Rabin carries his story effortlessly.

For all its flaws, The Big Rewind is frequently a blast to read — it’s a page-turner and Rabin is an entertaining, if easily distracted, tour guide. Patient readers, as well as pre-existing Rabin fans, are sure to find, amidst the mass of creative expletives and biting sarcasm, what is at heart a remarkable story about depression and the redemptive powers of Jean-Luc Godard and Dr. Dre.