WE ALL know “Woody Allen”, but do we know Woody Allen? There is a difference. One is the neurotic, seemingly timeless New Yorker we’ve witnessed onscreen for some 30 years, kvetching around the Upper East Side of Manhattan with only a few anxious one-liners to protect him from the vagaries of medical ailments, “kamikaze women” and the meaninglessness of a godless universe. The other is the 69-year-old man, born Allen Konigsberg, who created him. And lately they haven’t always been one and the same.

In Allen’s latest film, Melinda and Melinda, the embryonic story is put into an artistic Petri dish and replicated, once as comedy, once as tragedy. The resulting male lead is divvied up accordingly; as the respective struggling actors whose tenuous marriages are disturbed by the sudden appearance of Radha Mitchell’s titular character(s), Will Ferrell gets the funny lines, while Jonny Lee Miller gets to brood and practise his American accent.

Despite the best efforts of both men it’s still like watching movie karaoke. Their individual characters — hapless romantic and churlish cynic — are not as far removed as one might think and Allen has combined such qualities in his own screen protagonists since before Jonny Lee Miller was born.

For so long, in fact, that many have come to believe that there’s no acting involved. Ever since his 1968 play Play It Again, Sam, Allen’s dramatic persona has remained more or less fixed. On the rare occasions that he has deigned to appear in other people’s films, Woody is still Woody, even when voicing a CG-animated insect in Antz (“I had a very anxious childhood — when you’re the middle child in a family of five million you don ’t get any attention”).

In Allen’s own films, how-ever, a growing number of surrogates have been drafted in to “the Woody Allen role”. It began with the theatre/gangster satire Bullets Over Broadway in 1994, when the part of the tyro playwright caught between mob-pressured artistic compromise and his own libido needed a younger actor. The significantly taller stand-in John Cusack stoops a lot and downplays some of Allen’s trademark tics.

Oddly, he is often shot from behind or in wide shots, as if to disguise his character’s Woodyness. It doesn’t, but merely dilutes an already watered-down character.

By contrast Kenneth Branagh’s horny, insecure journalist in Celebrity (1998) gives us the full “Woody”, from the outset launching into a bizarre impersonation of his director’s stuttering vocal inflections and jerky hand gestures as if he’s on the big-screen version of Stars in Their Eyes. In the recent Anything Else, Jason Biggs’s — surprise, surprise — struggling artist with relationship issues offers a slightly toned-down impression. He arguably comes off worse, though, as he frequently shares the screen with Allen himself, here playing an older, more bitter, borderline crazy version of the front his co-star is slavishly imitating.

What makes all this sincere flattery more puzzling is that, quite honestly, “Woody Allen” is entertaining — and less and less so — only when Allen is playing him. It’s a template part cut specifically to Allen’s own delivery and mannerisms. It’s often deliberately entwined with his own autobiography — most obviously with Annie Hall, based on his relationship with his co-star Diane Keaton (née Hall), or Husbands and Wives, released in the immediate aftermath of Allen’s acrimonious parting from his (screen) partner Mia Farrow and affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn.

“Woody Allen” may be witty, needy or inept but he’s invariably the victim, even when pursuing women decades his junior. As with Charlie Chaplin, another writerdirector-star with an indelible screen persona and chequered personal life, it’s a tactic that is diversionary as much as revelatory: character as alibi. Plug another actor into the fact-or-fiction soap operatics and the inherently one-note character sounds shrill.

Naturally none of this gives Allen credit for his other talents. Despite recent lacklustre form, actors still jump at the chance to work with him. He has consistently created multi-faceted, award-winning parts for actresses such as Keaton, Farrow and Dianne Wiest. Yet for some reason most of the best male roles he’s written — Martin Landau’s murderous adulterer in Crimes and Misdemeanours; Sean Penn’s temperamental guitarist in Sweet and Lowdown — are hard to picture Allen himself playing.

“Woody” has become a safe parody that good actors try to imitate, usually badly. Allen needs a reinvention (he’s done it before: the Sixties stand-up comic incarnation of “Woody Allen” was highly self-assured). He seems capable, judging by his least typical role, the foul-mouthed, unscrupulous, vindictive writer of Deconstructing Harry — taken, apparently, because no replacement was available — who “can’t function in life, only in art”.

Perhaps a clear distinction would be a good starting place.

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