The title of “Pee-wee as Himself,” the two-part documentary that airs Friday on HBO, is a bit of a ruse, or maybe a riddle.
Pee-wee Herman, the manic, bow-tied man-child, was the greatest creation of Paul Reubens, who died in 2023. But Reubens was someone else, a self whose nature was obscured, sometimes by the overshadowing fame of his alter ego, sometimes by his own choice.
The question that hangs over this fascinating and tantalizing film is how much Reubens the director, Matt Wolf, will get out of Reubens. Before his death, Reubens cooperated on the documentary — but not without reservations, which he airs from the first moment he appears onscreen.
“I could have directed this documentary,” he says, but adds that he was told he would not have the appropriate perspective. In his interviews with Wolf, he still seems not entirely convinced. He wants to tell his story; he is not so sure he wants his story to be told for him. He wants to show us his nature, but it is not simply going to explode out of him as if somebody said the secret word on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
What unfolds, over more than three hours, is in part a public story: How Reubens channeled his genius into an anarchic creation that bridged the worlds of alternative art and children’s TV, then had his life derailed by trumped-up scandals that haunted him to the end.
It is also partly a spellbinding private story about artistry, ambition, identity and control. What does it mean to become famous as someone else? (The documentary’s title refers to the acting credit in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” as a result of which Reubens remained largely unknown even as his persona became a worldwide star.) And what were the implications of being obscured by his creation, especially for a gay man in a still very homophobic Hollywood?
Reuben gave Wolf access to his vault of images and archives, which help bring the more hidden Reubens to vivid life, especially in the documentary’s first part. We see him as a TV- and stage-besotted kid in New York State and Florida. We see him as a theater student at the California Institute for the Arts, confident and smokily handsome, pursing serious acting and doing drag (whose aim of “passing,” he says, helped teach him to fully inhabit an alter ego). We see him venture into improv and alt-comedy, landing on “The Dating Game” and “The Gong Show.”
We also see him in a yearslong relationship with a man identified as Guy, with whom he moved to Los Angeles, and from whose sense of humor he borrowed elements of Pee-wee. Reubens was open about the relationship and came out to family, including his “macho and swaggery” father. Then the relationship ended, and Reubens decided that he had to choose between his way of life and his career. “I was as out as you could be,” Reubens says. “And then I went back in the closet.”
The ”pact with the devil,” as Reubens calls it, paid off, as his Pee-wee character grew from a bit about a hapless comedian to the center of a stage show to the star of a hit Tim Burton film.
The more familiar part of Reubens’s story unfolds in Part 2, with the making of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” the marriage of art house surrealism and sugar-frosted anarchy that aired for five improbable seasons on CBS. Wolf pulls in interviews with colleagues and collaborators, among them, Laurence Fishburne, Natasha Lyonne and Gary Panter, the punk-scene artist who designed the vivid, living set.
Throughout the telling, there is a push-pull with Reubens as a documentary subject, which is also part of the story. He doubles back, questions premises, needles Wolf for a greater say in the production. He was, in his own telling, someone who demanded control in his own career, which alienated some colleagues but also helped him make great work. He is spurred by a confidence, even a soft-spoken cockiness, in his own instincts. You can see it even at the end of his life — that cheeky mastery of the camera, the impulse to charm, to tease, to perform.
And after all, Reubens had seen what happened when he lost control of his narrative. His 1991 arrest on a charge of indecent exposure made him the butt of late-night jokes and led CBS to pull episodes of “Playhouse.” In 2002 he was arrested on charges of child pornography, stemming from his vast collection of vintage erotica; the charges were later dropped but still tied, leeringly, insinuatingly and unfairly, to his fame as a kids’-TV figure.
This was the sort of demonization that we’ve seen covered in reclamatory documentaries about figures like Britney Spears. In “As Himself,” Wolf does not make the controversies the sum total of his film. Still, Reubens’s treatment as his career was derailed informs everything here.
Reubens died while the interview process was still underway, having kept his diagnosis of cancer closely guarded for years. In a recording he made the day before his death, he says, “I wanted to let people know who I really was and see how painful it was to be labeled as something I wasn’t.”
It seems, however, that there was a part of Reubens that would always have been ambivalent about addressing the controversies. At another point in the film, he worries about having a narrative of victimhood overshadow his work.
In the end, if “As Himself” is necessarily incomplete, it stands as a tribute to Reubens’s genius and complexity. It lets the boy we all knew be joined by the man who — however ambivalently — wished we could have known him better.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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