HBO’s Compelling Paul Reubens Doc

“I was born in 1938 in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi River. My father worked on a steamboat,” Paul Reubens tells Matt Wolf, director of the new two-part HBO documentary series, Pee-wee as Himself.

He, of course, was not. Reubens was born in Peekskill, New York, in 1952. His father was … well, his father was a lot of things, including a founder of the Israeli Air Force, but he definitely didn’t work on the steamboat.

Reubens’ joke — one of the first things he says in the documentary — points to two important things that are central to Pee-wee as Himself, an entertaining, enlightening and enjoyably confounding portrait of an enjoyably confounding artist.

First, Reubens, who died in 2023, had been constructing his own identity for decades. He spent so many years making talk show appearances and personal cameos as beloved alter ego Pee-wee Herman that it became impossible to know who the man behind the squeaky-voiced, suit-wearing man-child was. One of the many pleasures of Pee-wee as Himself is getting a sense of Reubens as a separate personality, even as the possibility never quite leaves your mind that “Paul Reubens,” as featured in Pee-wee as Himself, could be every bit as fabricated as Pee-wee Herman. That gives Wolf the impossible task of opening one Reubens/Pee-wee nesting doll after another looking for the Root Reubens, Pee-wee Prime. (The process of studying and interpreting Paul Reubens could be know as “Hermaneutics,” a not-quite-joke that will amuse exactly seven people.)

But second, Reubens filmed 40 hours of interviews with Wolf, and the impression conveyed by Pee-wee as Himself is one of constant push and pull. Reubens initially wanted to make his own documentary about himself, only to be talked out of it by Wolf and friends and loved ones, and it’s a decision he still hadn’t made peace with at the time of filming.

“You’re not supposed to control your own documentary,” admits Reubens, who passed away in 2023. “You don’t have perspective, really, on yourself.”

Fitting words from a man whose most famous catchphrase ended with, “But what am I?”

As featured in the documentary, Reubens is constantly breaking character (with the character being “Paul Reubens,” replaced by … “Paul Reubens?”), accusing Wolf of trying to steer him, of trying to build their back-and-forths toward predetermined destinations. The confrontations are almost always good-humored, perhaps another character being played.

Either way, the doc gives a version of Reubens I’ve never seen before, offers insights into his career that range from hilarious to heartbreaking, and will absolutely make Pee-wee as Himself a must-watch for the multiple generations raised on and warped by all things Pee-wee.

As Reubens points out (and which got Reubens in trouble in the second half of his life), he spent five decades collecting things, including a thousand hours of personal footage and tens of thousands of personal photographs going back to early childhood. This is a treasure trove that elevates the documentary nearly as much as those recounted stories.

With Pee-wee Herman standing as one of pop culture’s defining Peter Pan figures, I found the first part — 99 minutes to the second part’s 101 minutes, though they both race by — more captivating. The development of arrested development. It’s one thing to hear about Reuben’s childhood obsession with circuses, his transition into local theater in Florida, then into avant-garde and then improv comedy. It’s another thing to see footage of the elegantly androgynous young Reubens forging several of those constructed identities, experimenting with characters and discovering his sexuality before Pee-wee Herman was even a germ of an idea.

There’s a charisma and a versatility in those home movies, Groundlings tapes and excerpts from early media appearances like The Gong Show that might make one lament Reubens’ hypothetical chameleonic career that Pee-wee consumed like so many unborn siblings absorbed in utero. One can see, in that nascent Reubens, a performer who might have won Oscars or have been the biggest cult star in the world, which I guess he ended up being anyway.

You can also see, in the recent interviews with Reubens, the poignancy and lingering doubt that he felt about certain choices — particularly deciding to return to the closet after spending much of his 20s out and, at least briefly, in love — that prioritized success in Pee-wee guise over being true to Paul Reubens. Those introspective moments on his sexuality and his generally mysterious personal life feel like the vein that Wolf found richest to explore and that Reubens was most reticent to reveal, and that makes for good conversation.

The first episode is dominated by Reubens’ storytelling and reflections, though there are appearances by his sister Abby (that they have a brother is never even mentioned over four hours, which is a slightly odd omission, though I’m not sure what it represents), friends from youth and college and Groundlings. The episode takes us through Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, complete with complimentary and complementary interviews with fellow oddball Tim Burton.

The second episode picks up with Pee-wee’s Playhouse and many of the show’s key collaborators, including Laurence Fishburne, Lynne Marie Stewart, S. Epatha Merkerson and Natasha Lyonne. Reubens is candid and perhaps regretful about some of his controlling behavior on the show, and its eventual demise; ditto some of the choices made on Big Top Pee-wee.

It’s in the frequently troubled later segments of Reubens’ life that Pee-wee as Himself has to labor a little. At the beginning of the documentary, Reubens expresses the desire to set the record straight on a few things, but his ability to do so end up being limited for a number of reasons that play out on-screen. It isn’t that the documentary avoids or evades discussing Reubens’ two arrests, which forever changed the way some people viewed him, but much of those stories has to be told by other people and, thus, are less revelatory. Friends like David Arquette and Debi Mazar, as well as his publicist and attorney, give their perspectives, while Reubens’ direct thoughts are more limited.

By making the most of his time with his subject and refusing to sanitize the tone of their interactions, Wolf has made a documentary that stands up well alongside HBO’s recent run of “Difficult Funny Men” documentaries focused on the likes of Garry Shandling and George Carlin. As seen here, Reubens was difficult and welcoming, juvenile and reflective, brilliant and flawed, and I’m betting an entirely different documentary could have been made about him as an entirely different person, which only adds to the fascination.