By Lucy Spicer

When a documentarian interacts with their film’s participants on screen, the project invariably takes on a particular point of view that separates it from vérité works. But when the participant has famously avoided trusting a documentarian with their story for years, the very act of speaking with the elusive figure becomes an observational exercise. Such a dynamic was the case between director Matt Wolf and his “dream subject,” Paul Reubens.

“Early on in Paul’s and my process, we decided we were gonna document our dynamic because we felt it was reflective of who Paul is, or was,” says Wolf at the post-screening Q&A for his two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself, which premiered January 23 at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. “And he was someone who was deeply gregarious by his own admission, extremely controlling, very confident, but also profoundly ambivalent about being known publicly.”

It’s unsurprising that Paul Reubens would have mixed feelings about putting himself out there after the hit his career took following his legal issues in the ’90s and early 2000s. Through a staggering wealth of archival footage and home videos (“[Reubens] saved everything and was an archivist in his own right,” explains Wolf) as well as interviews with Reubens’ friends, family, and of course, the man himself, Wolf’s episodic documentary chronicles the iconic actor and comedian’s life from childhood through his comeback in the 2010s. As the title would suggest, his signature character — the quirky, childlike Pee-wee Herman — is a major focus of the doc, but Reubens also spends time recounting parts of his personal life that he had previously chosen to keep private. 

And while the revelations about his youth, personal relationships, and sexuality contribute to the larger portrait, the most fascinating pieces of the documentary are those in which Reubens is fighting the director.

Wolf explains that he observed Reubens in vérité, and that footage became essential to the picture of who he really was. “It’s the ways in which he dodged sharing who he was and used humor to deflect, but also then poured into this revealing and intimate and thoughtful and profound statement. Paul and I would talk about our conflict and our dynamic and his discomfort with our relationship on camera. And I think it was cathartic for him and helpful to just put it out in the open in front of other people, and he did it in ways that were often really funny.”

Reubens’ deflections are mesmerizing, his background in improv and mastery of comedy on full display as he makes jokes and adopts airs so quickly that it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether or not he’s kidding — which, of course, is his aim. 

A pivotal detail that Reubens kept from the film team was that he had cancer, and he died in 2023 before the project could be completed as planned. But his legacy and impact are nonetheless woven through every part of the unfinished documentary. “I hope that Paul is reappraised as a generation-defining artist,” says Wolf. “I hope that people are self-critical about discounting his artistic accomplishments because of his arrests, and, most of all, I hope that a younger generation, like I was one time, discovers his work and is moved by it and it transforms who they are, because that’s what happened to me, and I think the work is timeless.”