Some bio documentaries are carried mostly by the reflective, archival footage that send you back to the subject’s heyday.
But in Matt Wolf’s “Pee-wee as Himself” — as wonderful as much of the archival stuff is — nothing is more compelling than when Paul Reubens is simply himself.
Before his death from cancer in 2023, Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews with Wolf. His cooperation is clearly uncertain and sometimes strained in the film — he stopped participating for a year before talking about his infamous 2001 arrest — and his doubts on the project linger throughout.
Reubens would rather be directing it, himself, he says more than once. The man many know as Pee-wee Herman is used to controlling his own image, and he has good reason for being skeptical of others doing so. But beyond that tension over authorship of his story, Reubens is also delightfully resistant to playing the part of documentary cliche.
“I was born in 1938 in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi River,” he begins. “My father worked on a steamboat.”
Talking heads have gotten a bad rap in documentaries in recent years, but in “Pee-wee as Himself,” nothing is more compelling than Paul Reubens simply sitting before the camera, looking back at us.
Pee-wee may be iconic, but Paul Reubens is hysterical. And Wolf’s film, with that winking title, makes for a revealing portrait of a performer who so often put persona in front of personhood. In that way, “Pee-wee as Himself,” a two-part documentary premiering Friday on HBO and HBO Max, is moving as the posthumous unmasking of a man you can’t help but wish we had known better.
Reubens was a product of TV. He grew up transformed by shows like “Howdy Doody,” “The Mickey Mouse Club” and, later, “I Love Lucy.”
“I wanted to jump into my TV and live in that world,” he says.
Part of the delight of the first half of Wolf’s film is watching the wide range of inspirations — the circus culture of Sarasota, Florida, where his family moved to; Andy Warhol; performance art — coalesce into a singular creation like Pee-wee. That name, he says, came from a tiny harmonica that said “Pee-wee” on it, and a kid named Herman he knew growing up.
“It was a whole bunch of things that had never really connected connecting,” says Reubens.
Wolf carefully traces the birth of Reubens’ alter-ego through the Groundlings in Los Angeles, on stage at the Roxy and then out into the world, on “The Gong Show,” on Letterman, in the 1985 Tim Burton-directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and, ultimately, on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
“I felt in a way I was bringing the character out into the wild,” he recalls. “I just stayed in character all day.”
That came with obvious sacrifices, too. For the sake of his career, Reubens stayed closeted as a gay man. He grew intensely private and seldom appeared in public not in character. Reubens also jettisoned some of his close collaborators, like Phil Hartman, as his fame grew. There’s tragedy, both self-inflicted and not, in Reubens’ increasing isolation.
When Reubens was arrested in 1991 and charged with indecent exposure, Reubens’ carefully guarded persona came crashing down. The scandal was worse because people knew only Pee-wee and not Reubens. There was also injustice in the whole affair, particularly the 2002 arrest that followed on charges of child pornography that were later dropped. In both cases, homophobia played a role.
When Reubens does get around to talking about it, he’s most resistant to painting himself as a victim, or offering any, as he says, “tears of a clown.”
Wolf, the director of films like “Recorder,” about Marion Stokes, who recorded television all day long for 30 years, and “Spaceship Earth,” about the quirky 1991 Biosphere 2 experiment, is better known as a talented documentarian of visual archives than as an compelling interviewer of celebrities.
“Pee-wee as Himself” would have probably benefited from less one-sided interplay between subject and filmmaker. But Wolf’s time was also limited with Reubens and just getting this much from him is clearly an accomplishment.
Above all, Reubens says he’s doing the film to clear a few things up. In the end, the full portrait of Reubens — including all his playful, self-deprecating charm in front of the camera — add up to a much-needed retort to some of the misunderstandings about Reubens.
The day before he died, Reubens called Wolf to say one last thing: “I wanted to let people know who I really was and see how painful it was to be labeled as something I wasn’t.”
“Pee-wee as Himself,” a Warner Bros. release is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 205 minutes. Three stars out of four.
