Driven-dissipative many-body systems are difficult to analyze analytically due to their nonequilibrium dynamics, dissipation, and many-body interactions. In this paper, we consider a driven-dissipative infinite-range Ising model with local spontaneous emission, which naturally emerges from the open Dicke model in the large-detuning limit. Utilizing an adaptation of the Suzuki-Trotter quantum-to-classical mapping, we develop an exact field-theoretical analysis and a diagrammatic representation of the spin model that can be understood from a simple scattering picture. With this representation, we are able to analyze critical behavior, finite-size scaling, and the effective temperature near the respective phase transition. Our formalism further allows a detailed study of the ordered phase where we find a "heating" region within which the effective temperature becomes negative, thereby exhibiting a truly nonequilibrium behavior. At the phase transition, we find two distinct critical behaviors with overdamped and underdamped critical dynamics at generic and weakly dissipative critical points, respectively. We further show that the underdamped critical behavior is robust against short-range perturbations and is not an artifact of the mean-field nature of the model. To treat such perturbations, we extend our diagrammatic representation to include the coupling to spin waves due to the short-range interactions. The field-theoretical approach and the diagrammatics developed in this work should prove useful in applications to generic short-range driven-dissipative spin systems.