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Sinatra: The Chairman, the closing volume in James Kaplan’s double-barreled biography of Frank Sinatra, is best read with a dose of Sinatra downloads close at hand. As an impeccably sourced catalog of Sinatra’s bad behavior throughout the resurrected second half of his extraordinary career, this 883-page tome is definitive, and irresistibly engrossing.

It is also exhausting – as Sinatra himself could be – and often exasperating, as Sinatra indisputably was. Frequent breaks to reconnect with Frank: The Voice (also the title of Kaplan’s first volume) are decidedly required.

The bounty of Sinatra’s boo-boos are the stuff of biographical beneficence. His blowups, his break-ups, his gangster fetishism, his Kennedy fixation – these are all gifts that just keep on giving for any biographer and Kaplan mines them as effectively as any of Sinatra’s many biographers before him. Kaplan has not uncovered so much that is new, but he does synthesize and judiciously sift the voluminous historical and tabloid record for the ring of truth buried in Sinatra’s dirty laundry.

Kaplan is also piercingly perceptive about Sinatra’s turbulent personal relations with both men and women, but especially with troubled and brilliantly talented men (like Sinatra himself), particularly Sammy Davis, Jr., Sinatra’s benighted little “shadow” buddy, and Nelson Riddle, Sinatra’s torturously insecure arranger and supreme collaborator. Kaplan captures with unblinking clarity the galling abusiveness that dominated all of Sinatra’s closest relationships.

What often eludes him, unfortunately, is Sinatra the musician. There is a deficiency of music in Kaplan’s writing about Sinatra singing; about the songs that Sinatra chose and why, about the sound that Sinatra painstakingly and unsurpassably created in recording studios and on nightclub and concert stages.

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And what, after all, is Sinatra without that music? A titanic celebrity. An epic boor. Often a rat.  Of course, he was so much more, and no one understands this better than Kaplan. He tries hard to communicate Sinatra’s peerless musical significance, quoting a great deal, and quite lucidly, from writers who have devoted themselves to defining Sinatra, the singer. Kaplan also dives in himself, of course, but too much of the book’s weakest writing results, as in his description of Sinatra’s most momentous studio moment, the marathon, after-hours recording of Nelson Riddle’s climactic arrangement for "I’ve Got You Under My Skin:”

"Despite the lateness of the hour and the number of takes, despite the number of unfiltered Camels he has smoked that day, Sinatra, under his Cavanaugh fedora, is singing as easily and bell-clearly as if he had just stepped out of the shower and taken it into his mind to do a little Cole Porter."

As Sinatra himself might have said, that just doesn’t cut it.

A bedeviling feature of Kaplan’s initial Sinatra volume was the machine gun staccato of tough-guy sentence fragments that Kaplan deployed as his authorial voice; as if the writer found his subject so unapproachable, and at times, so objectionable, that he could only snipe at him under his breath.

Such turgid syntactical rasps have not been purged entirely from Sinatra: The Chairman. (“And that he was strapped for cash, and that Cal-Neva was bleeding him – these were not good signs.”) Thankfully, the heat of Sinatra’s story increasingly burns away the torturous splintered-speak, yielding some excellent writing. Kaplan is terrific dissecting Sinatra and the mob. His elucidation of Sinatra’s contribution to the shadowy Kennedy presidential campaign is exemplary. He is at his best reporting “the less than sublime goings-on,” as he terms them, that “always in Frank’s life…bracketed sublime music.”

It should not surprise anyone that the story of Frank Sinatra’s rise and fall and rise and final fade-out -- which arrives in advance of the centennial of his birth, on Dec. 12 -- is very much the story of America in the 20th century. Sinatra’s second act was postwar America’s saga, in all its triumphant excesses, its voraciousness, its loutishness, its lust, its corrosiveness, its abrasiveness, its kindnesses, but most of all in its absolute expression of the transcendence of individual talent. That’s a lot to grasp. James Kaplan doesn’t get it all but he does get plenty. Fortunately, the soundtrack exists to fill in the blanks.

Sinatra: The Chairman

By James Kaplan

Doubleday, 883 pp.

3.5 stars out of four

Barry Singer is the author of Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill.