A dream prospect. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the short-lived, self-destructive wunderkind who made movies about love as masochism, pain as an inevitable condition and history as a dire weight upon his native Germany, has long been in need of an equally forthright celebration. And who better to provide it than one-time NME star, cultural contrarian and film nut Ian Penman, in his first original book since his great comeback suite of music essays, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, in 2019? Well, hold your horses.

Fassbinder – RWF – was an artist whose work once had a “huge and axis-shifting effect” on Penman as a young cinephile. Now, in his early 60s, the fan wonders exactly why he was so enthralled by the film-maker. Straight off, he made the mistake, he says, of trying to rewatch the oeuvre in lockdown: Fassbinder films are about the very last thing you need during an enforced isolation. Berlin Alexanderplatz, his “iconic” TV series, was “especially hard going”. (Funnily enough, I tried the same thing, same time, and had to retire hurt after two episodes.) No, Thousands of Mirrors is not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It’s much more interesting than that – a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman’s younger self, from peripatetic RAF family to lonely Norfolk autodidact. Instead of going to art college in the late 1970s he took a year off, moved to London… “and here we are, 45 years later”.

The book proceeds in a sequence of numbered paragraphs that flit from one thought to another, sometimes a quotation or a definition, a burnished epigram or aperçu. The stories of subject and writer enfold one another. Born in May 1945, Fassbinder grew up an only child in a postwar Germany traumatised by its 12-year period of insanity. From the age of six, he and his mother lived in a Munich boarding house after his father abandoned them. A recalcitrant boy, he moved from school to school, ingesting the Oedipal drama of home life and making his first ventures into radical theatre. (He later cast his mother in several films, shouting at her on set.) Like Billy Wilder and his hero, Douglas Sirk, RWF learned on the job, “from the streets to the theatre stalls to the screen”. Penman deals with the early output in a blizzard of impressionistic strokes that may put off the uninitiated viewer for ever: “Boredom is the crucial factor here… anhedonia, existential wilting, mute withdrawal. Sudden bursts into hysterical violence.” And fans may also reconsider their allegiance to the work. I never much cared for his gangster film Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), but I did think it a brilliant title (it was also used by Robert Katz for his 1986 biography).

Not Penman, though, or not any more. “Love Is Colder Than Death. It’s a tart, snappy, memorable line, but – really? All love, categorically? He is an expert on poisons, but has no interest in cures.” That is such a good diagnosis of the Fassbinder ethos. He is just as persuasive about Despair (1978), the prestige Nabokov adaptation about a chocolate factory owner who fakes his own suicide (ineptly). I last saw the film at a BFI retrospective in the company of an eminent film critic friend; we both left the cinema with a vaporous “?” floating over our heads. It did that to people. Dirk Bogarde, its star, was aghast on seeing it, so too Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay. Penman skewers it: “The film displays at best a kind of interior decorator neurasthenia, a Fabergé egg melancholia, without the taint of anything like madness. It is modish glassware.”

Some of the films he found “painful” to watch again; some he had to stop watching altogether. But that scepticism makes this a more complex and enlightening book than an all-hail-to-thee tribute might have been. And he acknowledges that certain Fassbinder films have actually improved with age. Fear Eats the Soul is tender and beautiful, a Sirkian melodrama poignantly strung on the social prejudices of race, colour and age. The Marriage of Maria Braun, which he once found “glum”, now seems “luminous, sublimely crafted”. And a film I love, which Penman rather skimps on, is the 1974 black-and-white Effi Briest, in which RWF’s artful manipulation of mirrors and his dreamy-eyed muse Hanna Schygulla convey the double nature of the story’s wronged heroine.

In June 1982, Fassbinder was found dead in a Munich apartment, a victim of his appetites – 60 to 80 cigarettes a day, a diet of Bavarian sausages and cabbage (ugh), plus a suicidal dosage of heroin and cocaine. He was 37. He had talked about his decision to live a short but “intense” life and meant it. Penman wonders: “But what if you find yourself still alive, in late middle age?” This immediately prompted thoughts of Orson Welles. Bloated, blighted, babyish of face, he too started out as a wonder boy, before his talent went into steep decline. Fassbinder, however, had already made more than 40 films and was furiously at work on his next. He had had a tantalising conversation with Jane Fonda about her taking the title role in a film about Rosa Luxemburg. But life outpaced him.

Penman makes fugitive allusions to his own drug-hounded past and imagines himself waking in his book-lined room “like my very own Egyptian tomb… already dead”. For a long time he seemed to disappear, his byline dropped off the radar. Happily, Thousands of Mirrors reveals him in the land of the living. It’s a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time. The writers and artists we cherished don’t stay the same, because we don’t. As a 19-year-old I was in thrall to Bowie, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Ian Penman in the NME. Maybe I regard them differently now, in middle age. But I love them still.

• Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply