‘Pee-wee as Himself’ Review: The Late Paul Reubens Opens Up — When He Doesn’t Close Up — in an Expansive Portrait
“I want to set the record straight on a couple of things, and that’s it.” So says Paul Reubens — better remembered by many viewers as offbeat children’s entertainer Pee-wee Herman — at the outset of “Pee-wee as Himself,” as he and director Matt Wolf tentatively lay out the terms of the documentary they’re making. If he meant that, or at least if Wolf took him at his word, the film would be far shorter and slighter than it is. As it turns out, at 200 minutes carved from over 40 hours of interviews, “Pee-wee as Himself” is the last word on a life and career that retained a number of secrets and mysteries even after attaining an invasive degree of celebrity. The last word in more ways than one, sadly: Reubens died in 2023, the day after recording his final contribution.
Reubens is a compelling enough figure to carry a straightforward bio-doc, and over its substantial length, Wolf’s two-part film does justice to its subject’s thoroughly sui generis artistry — a rare blend of experimental performance, broad comedy and high, queer camp that caught imaginations of all ages — while giving due scrutiny to the off-screen legal troubles that unfairly threw his career off-course. Reubens is a generous, engaging raconteur on all such matters, while also allowing himself to be drawn on a personal life that he kept close to his chest up until his death. But it’s the brittle, unsettled dynamic of the interview footage itself that makes “Pee-wee as Himself” unusual and engrossing, as Wolf and Reubens — never, we learn, an artist comfortable with surrendering creative authority — grapple for control of a story that each wants to tell very differently. The result is perhaps a draw, though far from a dull one.
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The promise of first-hand personal confessions is what will drive viewership when this Sundance-premiered project is broadcast in episodic form on HBO later this year, and Reubens delivers several. Most notably among these is his first and only public discussion of his homosexuality, which may not come as a surprise to many, though he brings intimate, richly moving context to his reasons for remaining so long in the Hollywood closet. Still, if the objective of “Pee-wee as Himself” is to uncover the man behind the iconic alter ego — framing that Reubens challenges, preferring not to see the two as such separate entities — it’s his capricious presence as an interviewee that is most revealing. By turns playful and reticent, garrulous and evasive, earnest and obtuse, he may well be giving a performance of himself rather than openly baring his soul. Either way, the film suggests, that’s the man he is, or was.
The misdirection begins early and brazenly, with matters of basic factual record: “I was born in 1938, in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi river,” he says upfront. “My father worked on a steamboat, and his name was Steamboat Milton.” It sounds like a storybook intro, and it is indeed pure fiction — Reubens was born in 1952 in upstate New York, far closer to the Hudson — though the mirthful lie is so obvious that Wolf doesn’t bother correcting it. Perhaps this unreliable narrative applies instead to Herman, the uncanny, out-of-time manchild who seemed either dreamed or nightmared into being when he entered popular culture in the 1980s. Perhaps, more likely, Reubens is simply trolling his director and his audience. The tone is set.
Wolf and editor Damian Rodriguez deftly collate a wealth of material from either Reubens’ personal archives or audiovisual nuggets of the period to evoke a midcentury upbringing in which early American television — and a family move to circus-saturated Sarasota, Florida — shaped a young imagination already inclined toward whimsy and vaudeville exhibitionism. In adolescence, those inclinations shifted toward the bohemia of the late-1960s art scene, and upon leaving home and going west, CalArts proved a sympathetic environment for his singular talents and personality. At this stage of his life, Reubens was openly gay, while his family was fully supportive in this regard. A long-term, live-in relationship with a fellow artist brought him both happiness and creative stasis: “I lost a lot of myself and my ambition in being with someone else,” he says, reflecting on his subsequent decision to suppress his sexuality to prioritize his career.
For better or worse, the change in tack worked: The doc’s first half moves efficiently through his rise to comic cult status via his involvement in improvisational comedy troupe The Groundlings, and the initial invention of Pee-wHerman as an adult-oriented stage character, before reaching the mainstream tipping point in the mid-1980s where, for most of us, our relationship with Reubens begins. Wolf and his subject don’t dwell overly on anecdotal material regarding projects — notably the Tim Burton-directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and the five-year run of his landmark kids’ series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” — that are already firmly embedded in pop history. Unacquainted viewers, however, may be startled by recklessly avant-garde and unvetted they are, relative to the homogeneous family content churned out by the industry today.
Unsurprisingly, after this dizzy rise, the second half mostly centers the fall, completing a much-needed revisionist view of two amped-up media scandals that tarnished the performer’s reputation and broke the seal of his carefully guarded public image: his 1991 arrest for indecent exposure in an adult cinema, and a decade later, false charges for possession of child pornography. The latter, a misconception stemming from his large collection of vintage queer erotica, amounted, in the apt words of his publicist, to “a homophobic witch hunt.” Reubens, while firmly refuting the most malicious accusations against him, is loath to be too defensive: “How I do I weather this narrative, and not come off as a victim?” he asks, describing his mindset at the time, though he still doesn’t seem sure of the answer.
The tabloid humiliation may not have forced the star out of the closet, but it did spur his decision to effectively come out as Paul Reubens. After years of only appearing as Pee-wee in the media, he began conducting interviews out of character, while adjusting that persona to his own taste, finding new boundaries and disguises to protect the man inside. Though he’s insistent in his discussions with Wolf that he doesn’t want “Pee-wee as Himself” to be a “legacy movie,” this fascinating documentary, both comprehensive and somehow slippery, feels like the endgame of that instinct: shedding light on the man who created the character, while suggesting he was something of a creation himself.
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