The film critic David Thomson has described Allen as “a major-league fantasist, in which he is the central figure,” adding that “his mingling with attractive actors and actresses has been an immense fantasy inspiration to him.” Irrational Man fantasizes about murder, but also, less intriguingly, about its protagonist being an object of extraordinary desire to everyone he meets. The news of his arrival on campus is buzzed about by students and teachers alike. “I hear he has affairs with his students,” says one young woman excitedly, while an older professor remarks that the appointment will “put some Viagra in the philosophy department.” Upon arrival, Lucas has the charisma and heavy-lidded, wackadoodle charm of Phoenix, but he’s also a mess—overweight, sweaty, and inebriated. Still, neither his washed-up appearance nor the uninspired nature of his classes (“Philosophy is verbal masturbation,” he tells his students) seems to lessen his appeal.

Phoenix is just the latest actor to play a stand-in for the larger character of Allen, given that at 79, the director is now too old to plausibly play himself as a sex object. But this is a fairly recent concession. In 1996, at the age of 61, he successfully wooed the 29-year-old Julia Roberts in Everyone Says I Love You, the year after he had an affair with Mira Sorvino’s 20-something prostitute in Mighty Aphrodite. In 1979’s Manhattan, Allen’s 40-something character, Isaac, dates a 17-year-old schoolgirl played by Mariel Hemingway (the film is believed to be based on Allen’s real-life experiences dating 16-year-old Stacey Nelkin, whom he met on the set of Annie Hall and dated while she was attending Stuyvesant High School). In her 2015 memoir, Out Came the Sun, Hemingway describes how Allen invited her on an unchaperoned trip to Paris shortly after she turned 18. “Our relationship was platonic, but I started to see that he had a kind of crush on me, though I dismissed it as the kind of thing that seemed to happen any time middle-aged men got around young women,” she writes.

Even putting aside the ethical concerns about Allen, the allegations by Dylan Farrow, and the long list of films he’s made about men having preoccupations with much younger women (2014’s Magic in the Moonlight paired 53-year-old Colin Firth with 25-year-old Emma Stone, while Phoenix, by contrast, is only 14 years older then her), the secondary problem with Allen’s filmmaking as a romanticized expression of his id is that it spawns art that just isn’t very good. Irrational Man is turgid to the point of ridiculousness and absurdly anachronistic—having not bothered to research what it might be like living on a 2015 college campus, Allen’s Braylin is an institution from 50 years ago, in which teachers sleep with students without consequence, philosophy lecturers are rock stars, people idly skim through hardback books in the library, and Jill’s piano recital is the social event of the week. Allen’s dialogue, when spoken by actors who aren’t exactly like him, inevitably sounds like a poorly drafted student play, and even Phoenix, one of the most gifted actors of his generation, struggles to make it sound plausible. (“My brief time working on elevators during my college days might now pay off” is how one particularly important scene is introduced.)