“Death is so final,” says Paul Reubens early on in Pee-wee As Himself, the wonderful two-part documentary that premiered at Sundance in January and airs on HBO this week. “To be able to get your message in at the last minute…is incredible.” With this quote in mind, and knowing that director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Portrait Of Arthur Russell) was unaware of the actor’s cancer diagnosis during the 40 hours he spent interviewing him for the project over the course of a year, you might assume that the doc has an elegiac, somber, or depressing air about it. And at points, obviously, it does, tackling the actor’s two big scandals and his death in 2023 at 70. But generally speaking, that’s not the vibe nor the focus here, which is rather appropriate given the fun, buoyant, candy-colored spirit of Reubens’ creation—that ever-energetic, bowtie-wearing, mischievous manchild named Pee-wee Herman—and the shows and films he starred in.
Over its three-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime, Pee-wee As Himself feels both like an intimate sketch, painting a full-ish picture of the guy who brought the character to life and seemed unknowable by design (“I hid beyond an alter ego,” Reubens admits), and a celebration of a personality that somehow put a weird, sizable stamp on American culture in the 1980s. If you’re a fan of anything Pee-wee was in (the brilliant Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the wildly inventive Saturday-morning kids’ show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, his many appearances on Late Night With David Letterman, or his cameos on MTV and long-forgotten curiosities like Back To The Beach), it’s hard not to smile or be thrilled when seeing early versions of the character onstage at the Groundlings during midnight shows and then later at the Roxy, with audience members freaking out as this suit-wearing oddball threw candy at them.
But even if you weren’t particularly into him, Pee-wee As Himself offers a fascinating portrait of this artist as a young man, with Reubens reflecting on his love of Howdy Doody and other shows (“I wanted to jump into my TV and live in that world,” he says) and obsession with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which was headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, where he lived as a kid, a place that afforded him the opportunity to, say, have brunch with a family of chimps. Toss in his time at CalArts (where he performed in drag, directed envelope-pushing shorts, and fell in love with his first boyfriend), ambition to “meet Andy Warhol and be part of the Factory,” and the comedy and music happening in Los Angeles in the late ’70s, and you can see all of the ingredients that led to a show that, as one Playhouse producer puts it, was equally beloved by children and art-school stoners. “We mashed up punk, art, and comedy in a subversive way that had never been done before,” Reubens says of his early stage shows. And looking at the results, it’s pretty tough to argue with him.
Wolf smartly keeps the scope of his doc tight throughout, highlighting the often phenomenal home-video footage of Reubens rather than bringing in outside voices to help explain him or put the Pee-wee phenomenon in context. There aren’t any talking heads refreshing us on Playhouse‘s influence on kids’ programming, and if there is an anecdote about how one of the character’s movies, series, or stage shows was made, it’s by someone who helped make them. But for as much as the doc’s subject opens up here (about coming out and then going back in the closet, losing his first love to AIDS, choosing his career over relationships, feeling like he lost his “Midas touch” with the disappointing Big Top Pee-wee), he still keeps the filmmaker at a bit of a distance. When Wolf asks a follow-up question about Reubens’ childhood, the actor jokingly snaps, “I was just about to! I don’t want to curse but if you’d stop fucking interrupting me.” He slightly grins and goes on: “HBO wants a lot of fuck and tits and ass in this doc, so I can only say ‘fuck’; I’m not showing my tits or my ass in this. At least not today.” It is a funny, meta exchange (one of many in Himself) but it also underlines the artist’s inability to give over the telling of his story to someone else.
It’s not surprising to learn, near the doc’s end, that Reubens “delayed completing a final interview” that would have covered incidents that became media firestorms. (He was arrested for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater in 1991, and his house was raided for child pornography in 2002, with the documentary providing beyond-the-headlines background of the events.) But it’s also not surprising that Reubens left a heartbreaking voice message, in which he sounded notably frail, for the filmmaker the day before he passed away that addressed them. Wolf seems to have accomplished what he set out to do, getting to know the purposefully enigmatic guy behind the character—at least as much as anyone reasonably could—and earning some of his trust. That Pee-wee As Himself doesn’t end there but with colorful bursts of joy, wonder, and appreciation for the work Reubens left behind speaks volumes.
