The Secret, Closeted Life of Pee-wee Herman

PARK CITY, Utah—The world lost a genius when Paul Reubens died in 2023 at the age of 70, but he gets to tell his story—both the one about himself and the one about his beloved alter ego—in Pee-wee as Himself, a two-part HBO documentary that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

An insightful and intermittently contentious profile in which the subject vies for control of his dual narratives with director Matt Wolf, this account of Reubens’ off-camera life, notorious scandals, and triumphs as his most famous character, Pee-wee Herman, is a joyous and melancholy portrait of the push-pull between the private and the public, the real and the unreal, and the desire to hide and to be seen.

“I really want to set the record straight on a couple of things, and that’s pretty much it,” announces Reubens at the outset of Pee-wee as Himself, and as becomes clear during his many back-and-forths with Wolf (who’s primarily heard off-camera), he wants to dictate how that goes.

This is, as the documentary elucidates, part and parcel of Reubens’ lifelong approach to creativity and his career. The Reubens presented here is as funny, sly, and candid as one might imagine, yet he’s also anxious about how he’s going to come off and upset about the fact that he doesn’t have total say over this lengthy (205 minutes) biography. Nonetheless, he initially appears to accept the constraints of the project, confessing, “This is such a dumb thing to say but death is just so final that, to be able to get your message in at the last minute, or at some point, is incredible.”

That’s precisely what Reubens does in Pee-wee as Himself, which was produced while the star was in the midst of the secret six-year battle against cancer that took his life. Still, the comedian isn’t always totally sure about what he wants to disclose; in numerous instances, he makes a statement, then refutes it, and ultimately doubles back to where he began.

For example, after proclaiming that if someone disagrees with him, they’re obviously wrong, he teases, “No, I don’t really think that. Alright, maybe I do think that a little bit. No I don’t, I’m kidding. Or am I? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m kidding. I know. But you don’t.” The tensions between truths and lies, confession and evasion, and reality and performance defined Reubens’ life, and they’re present throughout Wolf’s film, especially during the moments when Reubens bristles at a question or complains about his lack of authorial power.

Much of Pee-wee as Himself details the chronological particulars of Reubens’ saga, from his Oneonta, New York, upbringing with an Indiana Jones-ish father and fairy tale-telling mother, to his clan’s relocation to Sarasota, Florida, and his interest in the avant-garde art scene, to his blossoming at the California Institute of the Arts.

As explicated by his commentary and his copious archival photos and movies from this era, Reubens spent his formative young-adult years as an openly gay man, complete with a boyfriend named Guy with whom he temporarily settled down. What mattered most to him, however, was his artistic career, and he decided that the way to achieve his goals was to re-enter the closet—where he remained for decades.

If Reubens concealed his sexuality behind a façade of straightness, he found great freedom by subsuming his personality beneath his celebrated persona: Pee-wee Herman. Pee-wee as Himself explains that the gray-suited, red-bowtied, weirdly cackling icon was an amalgamation of Reubens’ various adolescent loves and influences—ranging from Howdy Doody and I Love Lucy to the circus—and he quickly decided that the best way to make him ubiquitous was to never break character in front of an audience.

Wolf lays out how Pee-wee came into being, evolved, and graduated from the Groundlings stage where he was born to the big screen (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure) and small screen (Pee-wee’s Playhouse). In this endeavor, he’s aided by both Reubens’ revealing narration and a bounty of clips and snapshots from his early days as a struggling performer—including in dramatic roles, which he believed were his calling—and his later time in the spotlight and collaborations with a wealth of talented people, including punk rock artist Gary Panter and Saturday Night Live star Phil Hartman, a close creative partner with whom he had a falling out (apparently, Reubens could hold a grudge).

Reubens relished the celebrity he achieved with Pee-wee and yet simultaneously resented the fact that he, Paul Reubens, didn’t get the credit for it—just as the gonzo brilliance of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was largely attributed to its first-time director, Tim Burton (who praises the experience in a new chat).

The struggle between expression and repression defines Wolf’s film, and it peaks during the passages dedicated to the 1991 arrest for indecent exposure that wrecked Reubens’ reputation and put an abrupt halt to the Pee-wee phenomenon, as well as the ensuing child pornography charges that turned out to be a sham. At every turn, Reubens grappled with being both himself and his creation (who was both him and not him), and though the comedian confronts such issues head-on in the documentary, Wolf refrains from over-psychoanalyzing this or any other aspect of his tale, content to recognize Reubens as a man whose complications manifested themselves in productive and destructive ways.

Pee-wee as Himself is frequently a conventional affair, save for those scenes in which Reubens gets testy with Wolf over the direction of the material. At its end, the film reveals that Reubens eventually became so frustrated with the project that he stopped cooperating. Even so, Wolf lets him have the last word, first through an audio recording made the day before he died (“More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn’t”), and then through a prior admission that he felt like he was not simply a magnificent collector—his house was a veritable museum of art and knickknacks—but “a good vessel for it all.”

Pee-wee as Himself confirms that belief, as well as his success at bringing joyous laughter to millions. In the process, it conveys that Reubens was a true original—whether wearing his trademark suit and bowtie or not.