If you saw All That Jazz in 1979 and liked it, you may have found its honesty thrilling. If you didn’t like it, you may have found it self-indulgent, pretentious and perhaps even offensive. Or maybe you pulled out all four adjectives!

Time to watch again—or for the first time—because this no-holds-barred autobiography of award-winning director-choreographer Bob Fosse (which includes predicting his death in graphic images eight years before it occurred) remains a must-see film nearly 50 years after its release.

Fosse refuses to glamorize his stage and film career or his personal life. It’s all here in the character of Joe Gideon: the hard-driving chain smoker, the manipulator of virtually everyone in his world except daughter Michelle, the addiction to drugs and alcohol, the relentless womanizing, the obsessive perfectionism. Fosse dares us to empathize with Joe, and as played to the hilt by Roy Scheider, he is hellbent on making that very difficult.

Am I turning you off to All That Jazz? I hope not. This is powerful, strangely mesmerizing stuff—and Fosse even co-wrote the screenplay. But if you despise it (many did), I dare you not to admit that it’s brilliant. Just brace yourself.