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Before he died in 2023, saying the name “Paul Reubens” could conjure up very different reactions depending on who you asked. Some would react as you’d imagine he’d hope they would, with joy at delightful memories of his contributions to American art and pop culture, perhaps tossing off a quote from Pee-wee’s Playhouse or Big Adventure. Others would be less positive: His arrest for indecent exposure in 1991 and the later witch-hunt he suffered through for owning – gasp – a collection of gay erotica left an enormous and ugly footprint on his star on the Walk of Fame. We do this with celebrity biographies – we distill a person down to the most memetic aspects of their existence and demand they earn our affection once again. In a timeline in which Tom Cruise was Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. might still be a punchline, a collection of mugshots and drug-fueled antics that outweighed Less than Zero or Chaplin, in which Jay Leno’s jaundiced perspective on culture survives and endures like a well-maintained Chevy Nova. Yet, prompted by the cognizance of his mortality, Reubens got a chance to co-author (or, well, participate) in a documentary about his life: Pee-wee as Himself by Matt Wolf, a two-part HBO documentary that’s just so good it’s practically painful to watch, even as it’s a frequently joyous celebration of his life.
Reubens is a fascinatingly enigmatic subject – as obvious as that sounds, it quickly becomes clear how little people knew about him. We knew Pee-wee, after all, his Groudlings creation that soon stole the stage at the Roxy from Van Halen and company before taking over Letterman every two months on his way to the big (and small) screens. What we missed, partially because of how thoroughly Reubens scrubbed his past so that Pee-Wee could endure as a presence, was the path it took for him to get there. A child raised on television (who later found himself in Sarasota, the wintertime home of Ringling and Barnum, immersed in the circus) with a fiercely artistic bent, he initially wanted to be a Factory superstar when he “grew up.” Instead, he pivoted to comedy in the heady days of Steve Martin and Andy Kauffman-like experimentation with the form. His success was anything but guaranteed, yet his commitment to the bit separated him from the rest of the pack: If he hadn’t sacrificed himself for Pee-wee, well, he could have just been on the fucking Gong Show forever.
This is also, weirdly enough, why those arrests live on in the way they do: They were a betrayal, a glimpse of the human behind the red bow tie, fundamentally faith-shattering as if the entire nation found out it was their Schlitz-smelling neighbors, not Santa Claus, kissing their mothers on Christmas Eve. Even as vain and full of ego as he was at the height of his powers, he never let the act slip: Pee-wee always played himself in the credits, and Paul Reubens was one of three credited writers on Big Adventure. He wanted to be in control behind the scenes, and a lot of his ideas were the difference-makers: he was the guy who hired Gary Panter and Wayne White among all of the other outstanding contributors to Pee-wee’s style and sensibility; he was the one who reached out to Shelley Duvall about Tim Burton, he was the dude who threw the damn Tootsie Rolls out at the crowd and went on the Dating Game in-character to build press for himself stealthily. But keeping himself concealed was a choice that was as smart as it was ultimately tragic: it allowed Pee-Wee to grow during Reagan conservatism and caused him to crater when people could not suspend their disbelief any longer. The adult had emerged, and for some reason, we could not chew gum and walk when it came to Paul Reubens and Pee-wee’s co-existence.
Even as he works with Wolf as the subject here, they “battle” over creative control of the project. This is, after all, the most we’ve ever spent with him in street clothes, and Wolf is conscious that his subject wants to both dispel misconceptions about his life and preserve elements of his mystique. He doesn’t know Reubens’ specific reason for making a film like this right now, as he kept his illness a secret from everyone that wasn’t in his immediate orbit of close friends and family members, including the crew. So, their brief moments of sparring are given an extra bit of tragic context: Wolf thinks he’s just being cagey or frustrated at his lack of control, symptoms of Reubens’ overall dearth of trust in him as a filmmaker or an interviewer. You can feel his frustration when the actor starts riffing, making goofy faces, or openly talking about how he should just go ahead and say that all the “gay” business he spoke of was bullshit (he’s kidding, of course).
Of course, Reubens put an astonishing amount of trust in Wolf and the production, not only giving them access to his vast archives of memorabilia and footage, including all the gay-centric art films he worked on (and successfully buried once Pee-wee became big) and home movies with his one true love – a pre-fame relationship ended by Reubens’ striving for art-life greatness and the AIDS epidemic — but also 40 hours of his time right before the end. There comes a point in which he stops collaborating with the project, refusing to sit for an interview on some of the truly controversial (and, frankly, slanderous) moments of his public life, such as his bullshit prosecution for “obscene material” following Jeffery Jones’ crimes coming to light. Yet one has to wonder how much of that is due to fear or vulnerability and how much was simply because his decline was becoming too obvious to ignore.
Wolf’s disappointment gives way to something much more complex when it’s revealed that Reubens recorded a short audio clip for the director the day before he died, in which he tries to answer as much as he can. He wanted to clear his name and try to recast his life in a more accurate light than what the tabloids would have you remember him as. It is a fucking heartbreaking scene, with pastoral shots of the views from Reubens’ L.A. home – cats at the sliding doors, deer in the Hollywood hills, a lynx resting near the pool – giving a sort of aesthetic glimpse into what he might have seen in his last moments, his voice straining as he tries to get these final words out to the world. And, for all of their fears about how Pee-wee as Himself would turn out, it feels as if Wolf and Reubens had their goals realized: Reubens presents himself as a complex, charismatic, bitchy, funny, human being full of unexamined depth, and Wolf gets the chance to tell his story as only he can.
What we’re left with as the credits roll on the second part is a profound sense of loss – Wolf and Reubens have let us in close enough to, in the words of James Jones, “let [us] feel the lack” of his absence. That is an impossibly tricky thing to do, even in the most maudlin and sentimental variations of this style of biographical documentary, but, good lord, do they ever pull it off without ever resorting to those tricks. Pee-wee was always better than the simple stuff.