For more than 30 years — not under the radar but often just over it — James Toback has been putting together one of the smartest, most idiosyncratic and most thoroughly satisfying bodies of work in contemporary American cinema. In his screenplays for "The Gambler" and "Bugsy," and his own films as a writer and director, including "Two Girls and a Guy" and "Fingers," he has portrayed life in generous terms, as something very, very big. Outsize lusts, rages, ideas, mental flights, deceits and power plays fill the screen in Toback’s films, which, for all their passion, have a sly artistry.

To see the words "written and directed by James Toback" onscreen is to get ready to go places. An air of compulsiveness surrounds his films — as well as the question, "How audacious can he be?" His pictures have their own special soundscape, their own point of view; his characters have a particular way of talking. Like Mark Twain on the page, Toback can sometimes be gauche, but he is incapable of being boring. If he set out to be boring, he’d be boring in an interesting and original way.

Unknown to many, appreciated as a clever eccentric by others, Toback is an important auteur who is finally getting his due. On Friday, a documentary about his career, "The Outsider," directed by Nicholas Jarecki, will make its world theatrical premiere at the Roxie. Coinciding with the documentary’s run, the Roxie will also host a full-blown retrospective of Toback’s films, including "The Gambler" and "Bugsy" and eight of his nine films as a writer-director. Toback will be there to introduce evening screenings Friday and Saturday.

For some, the first experience of a Toback film is the beginning of a love affair — it was for me. For others, he’s an acquired taste. For most, the epiphany comes once they catch on that Toback is neither interested in conventional realism, nor in farce or black comedy. His films are not "off" — that is, they’re not imprecise forays into established genres. Instead, they belong to their own genre.

They’re made according to a specific directorial vision that sees life in heightened terms yet keeps one foot on solid ground. "Two Girls and a Guy" is a good example of the Toback tone, but all his films — all those he directed, at least — find that arresting balance. His films go to the edge, stay on the edge, but don’t tip over.

He is a truly witty filmmaker, with superb timing, a feel for the rhythms of conversation and storytelling. Few filmmakers have ever been so capable of imprinting a specific personality on their work, and of those, even fewer have been able to do it without becoming self-indulgent or testing an audience’s patience.

Toback is interested in the workings of the mind, and of the mind’s interaction with the big rivers of social trend. He has maintained a fresh interest in youth culture, an interest he sometimes conveys with a hint of his own longing (but not in an embarrassing way). He is a legitimate observer of the nonsense of wealth and privilege, and of the ambitions of the poor. And his fascination with women is boundless.

His presentation of women is especially interesting, because this is a filmmaker who is unapologetically male, who makes no pretense of any special sensitivity and whose guy characters (who often seem like an extension of Toback himself) are often motivated by a rampaging lust. Yet his depiction of women is consistently full, nuanced and convincing. He evinces a respect and a thrall for women, without any sour edge of hostility or creepiness.

Moreover — and this is incredibly apparent when you see his movies back to back — many of the actresses with whom he has worked were never better than in Toback’s movies.

Partly this is because he writes good women’s roles. Partly this is because he has the ability to reimagine actresses and see them in ways that other filmmakers don’t. Take Joey Lauren Adams in "Harvard Man." She plays a philosophy professor — who ever would have thought to give her such a role? Yet she carries herself with wit and authority, and it’s clear that she understands every word that comes out of her mouth in her lecture scenes. In the same film, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a Mafia princess, and adopts a flat, cold way of talking and a cynical aura that no one knew she possessed.

The pattern is repeated in film after film. No one who saw Natasha Gregson Wagner in "Two Girls and a Guy" could doubt that this was a star-making performance. But no director since has used Wagner with any intelligence, and she has all but disappeared. Brooke Shields was never so loose and engaging as she was in "Black and White." Nastassja Kinski wasn’t just luminous but bright and warm in "Exposed." Neve Campbell emerged as womanly and enigmatic in "When Will I Be Loved." And Molly Ringwald, in her first adult role, was never better than in "The Pick-Up Artist." In fact, to revisit her in that film is to wonder why she didn’t remain a star over the next two decades.

Toback, who was born in New York in 1944 and educated at Harvard and Columbia, began his writing career as a journalist for magazines such as Esquire. He published his first book, a portrait of his friend, football great Jim Brown, in 1971. "The Gambler" (1974), his first produced screenplay, starred James Caan as an English professor who can’t stop gambling, and losing. The film introduced some of the themes that would be repeated throughout Toback’s work — the interior struggle between lofty, artistic impulse and the self-destructive thirst for thrills and sensation.

He built on that theme four years later in "Fingers" (1978), with Harvey Keitel in a career-defining role as an aspiring concert pianist who works as a strong-arm collector for his loan shark father. Largely ignored at the time, the film has since come to be regarded as a masterpiece, as well as one of the most brutal and uncompromising films of the 1970s. (A recent French film, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," is a limp imitation.)

Toback followed that in 1982 with "Love and Money" with Ray Sharkey, probably his least artistically successful film and the only title not included in the Roxie Festival.

"Exposed" came in 1983, with Kinski as a college girl who becomes an international model. The picture is resoundingly odd, a mishmash of various plot elements, including one involving international terrorism, but it’s significant for several reasons:

1) Though clumsy in places, it’s the first Toback film to successfully combine seemingly disparate elements — something he would learn to do with ease in "Black and White" and "Harvard Man."

2) The film contains the visually arresting spectacle of Rudolf Nureyev and Kinski, look-alikes sharing the same frame in a movie romance.

3) Toback makes his acting debut in it, as Kinski’s English professor, a complete creep with whom she’s involved in an affair. He appears in three scenes and is hysterically funny, the only humorous element in an otherwise somber picture.

Toback’s 1987 film, "The Pick-Up Artist," was largely unappreciated in its day. Years later, several things jump out of it: Toback was the first to discover and make full use of Robert Downey Jr.’s loquacious charm and intelligence. The romance is sweet, but its coarseness and rough edges (involving sex, gambling, gangsters and alcoholism) are not there by accident — this is about love in the real world. And the film has dated well. It does not remotely seem like a movie from almost 20 years ago. It feels like a movie from last week.

Toback’s 1989 documentary, "The Big Bang," features the director onscreen asking various scholars, children, religious thinkers and actors (including Tony Sirico of "The Sopranos") about their ideas on creation, the universe, sex, the meaning of life and the afterlife. It’s a good primer for anyone interested in Toback’s recurrent themes.

Toback wrote the screenplay for "Bugsy" (1991), the Barry Levinson film starring Warren Beatty. It’s a good picture as it stands, but next time watch it with Toback’s work in mind, as another movie with a deranged hero and a great role for a woman (Annette Bening). In Levinson’s version, Bugsy is a charming eccentric who is prone to fits. Had Toback directed it, I imagine Bugsy might have been a little more off his rocker, and his madness would have been understood as the source of his inspiration.

Toback entered his best (and current) period in 1997, with "Two Girls and Guy." In this chamber piece, Downey plays a man who has been juggling two women (Wagner and Heather Graham). They find out about each other and confront him about his lies over the course of a long evening. The movie is, in its way, a celebration of a scoundrel, but what makes it rich and palatable is Toback’s frank understanding of promiscuity as a function of infantilism. The film provides the best ever showcase for Downey, Wagner and even Graham, who has never seemed so bright and forthright.

Toback followed this two years later with "Black and White" (1999), an outstanding, complicated film bringing together a host of characters in a story about hip-hop culture, from the rich white kids who emulate it to the poor black kids who live it. As further evidence of Toback’s capacity to recognize things in performers that others don’t see, Mike Tyson plays himself and comes across as a shrewd, self-aware man. Probably the funniest scene in any Toback film is the one in which Downey, as a gay documentarian, flirts with Tyson at a party. Mistake.

"Harvard Man" (2001), two years later, was inspired by Toback’s own near-disastrous experimentation with LSD in the 1960s. Set in modern times, the film deals with mobsters, gambling, drugs, group sex and the nature of identity. It’s a skillful film that explores and harmonizes all these elements into a brisk, entertaining story.

Toback’s most recent film, 2004’s "When Will I Be Loved," stars Campbell as the girlfriend of a hustler who asks her to sell her sexual favors to a rich man (Dominic Chianese) for $100,000. It’s a sophisticated examination of the relative power of money and youth, and it features Toback in another funny featured role, as a Jewish professor of North African studies, Hassan Al-Ibrahim Ben Rabinowitz.

Toback’s knowing sense of himself is an appealing quality, one related to his genuine interest in other people. Few personal filmmakers are as lacking in self-absorption. His curiosity about others is dynamic and rapacious and is probably why the subjects he covers are wide-ranging and his casts are enormous.

Toback’s films form one long, extended conversation about the most interesting and vital subjects in life. Starting Friday at the Roxie comes your chance to get in on the conversation.