Separating the artist from their artwork is very difficult when the creator hides inside his creation, adopting it as his alter ego. Filmmaker Matt Wolf triumphantly rises to the problem in Pee-wee as Himself, HBO’s revealing, rewarding two-part documentary profile of Paul Reubens, who for years we noticed and knew solely because the irrepressible Pee-wee Herman.
Culling from 40-plus hours of candid on-camera interviews earlier than Reubens’ sudden loss of life in 2023 at 70, with a wealth of archival footage and images, the movie presents its topic as droll, witty, and playfully combative, reluctant to cede management of his life story to the director. He needn’t have apprehensive.
Pee-wee as Himself is an enchanting, endearing, and shifting portrait of an entertainer who as a baby was mesmerized by early kids’s TV like Howdy Doody: “I wished to leap into my TV and stay in that world,” he says. He received his want when, after education himself in avant-garde efficiency artwork and comedy improv, together with appearances on the notorious The Gong Present, Reubens created the impish man-child persona of Pee-wee within the Eighties.
Shattered when he was rejected by Saturday Night time Reside (“the holy grail”), he went all in on Pee-wee, growing the character in a buzzy underground stage present that ultimately caught the curiosity of HBO, which produced a particular that helped launch Reubens and Pee-wee into the pop-culture mainstream. He grew to become a semi-regular on Late Night time with David Letterman, a full-fledged film star in Tim Burton‘s 1985 Pee-wee’s Massive Journey, and achieved cult immortality with the sweetly subversive Saturday-morning basic, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which ran for 5 seasons from 1986-90.
“My plan was to make folks assume that Pee-wee Herman was an actual particular person,” he says, solely permitting himself to be seen or interviewed in full Pee-wee regalia. “There wasn’t like a second within the ’80s that wasn’t actually tremendous cool to be me.”
His journey to the highest was derailed when Reubens, who spent most of his life as a closeted homosexual man, was arrested for indecent publicity in an grownup movie show in 1991: “I misplaced management of my anonymity, and it was devastating.” He was later falsely charged with possession of kid pornography, following a raid on his private assortment of homo-erotica.
In a poignant audio recording made the day earlier than his loss of life, Reubens notes that his hope with this movie was “for folks to see who I actually am and the way painful and troublesome it was to be labeled one thing that I wasn’t. … I wished one way or the other for folks to know that my complete profession, every thing I did and wrote was based mostly in love and my need to entertain and produce glee and creativity to younger folks and everybody.”
Mission achieved, superbly.
Pee-wee as Himself, Documentary Premiere, Friday, Might 23, 8/7c, HBO (stream on HBO Max)