Review: 'Pee-wee as Himself' gives Paul Reubens the final word on his identity

“I was born in 1938 in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi River; my father worked on a steamboat and his name was Steamboat Milton,” says Paul Reubens by way of misdirection in Matt Wolf’s sideways-titled documentary epic “Pee-wee as Himself,” premiering Friday on HBO.(Pee-wee is always only himself, but Paul Reubens was often — and the only — Pee-wee Herman.)Identity is at the heart of this story — the unresolvable relationship between the real self, the created self and the public self.

He wants to “be more known,” to “explain myself,” to “answer some questions … who I really am, and what’s my story, and how did it all, like, shake down” and “to set the record straight on a couple of things, and that’s pretty much it.” It is also joyful and delightful in a way that needs no explanation because it is full of Pee-wee Herman, knocked down to rise again.“It turns out you’re not supposed to direct your own documentary,” says Reubens, who also tells Wolf, “I feel like I’m going to come out at the other end of this process and be like, tch, I told everybody, I could have directed this documentary.” Television ‘Pee-wee as Himself,’ a two-part documentary directed by Matt Wolf premiering Friday on HBO, supplies a vivid portrait of Paul Reubens, who receded behind his character.Unknown to Wolf, Reubens, who sat for 40 hours of interviews before withdrawing from the project for unstated reasons in the film, had been sick with a blood cancer for six years.(He died in 2023.) But the subject offers some foreshadowing.

“This is such a dumb thing to say, but death is so final that to be able to get your message in at the last minute, or at some point, is incredible.”Whose film is it anyway? Control is a recurring theme, as it regards his work but also his person and what he would and wouldn’t show the world.First he decided to abandon all his other comedy characters — he had several — to concentrate on...