Pee-Wee as Himself (2025)

Director: Matt Wolf

Cast: Paul Reubens, Lynne Marie Stewart, Cassandra Peterson, John Moody

Have I Seen It Before: Nope! Bereft that it has taken me this many weeks to finally watch it. My parents had to tell me how good it was. Which feels like more of an injury than anything else.

Did I Like It: Any deep dive into the career of Reubens and the reign of Pee-Wee was going to be a must-watch for me right out of the gate. When Reubens died in 2023, I was more than a little sad, but I got philosophical about the whole thing after watching a few episodes of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, I got kind of philosophical about it all: Paul Reubens was an incredibly talented writer and performer who passed away too soon. Pee-Wee Herman is an idea, and incapable of dying.

Pee-Wee was a vessel designed to show people that you could be so thoroughly weird that most people might find you annoying* and still be worthy of friendship, love, and celebration. Attempting to unravel the relationship between Reubens the actor and Pee-Wee the character would be a minimum requirement of the film, and it delivers on that in spades. There’s plenty of other honest examinations of Playhouse, the downsides of the success in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and a defenses of the commercial failures of Big Top Pee-Wee (1988) too. It’s everything I could have wanted from a Pee-Wee documentary.

What elevates the film from the competent to one of the best films of the year lays in the friction between subject and filmmaker. One of the essential standards to measure the quality of a documentary is the degree to which the filmmaker has access to the subject. Not knowing that Reubens was battling the cancer that would eventually end his life, the filmmakers were resolute in not letting Reubens’ perfectionism and instincts as a storyteller take over the direction of the film.

Reubens withdrew his cooperation with subsequent interviews, but managed to try and say his peace the day before he passed away. Reubens tried to exercise control over the affair because after all of these years, the bifurcated nature of his identity, coupled with his intermittent legal troubles, and his sexuality, he wanted to be understood for who he was.

It turns out, the guy who needed a character like Pee-Wee the most was Reubens. It might be a sad end to a story about a man who was willing to give up everything for his creative endeavors. But now, after the end, Reubens may be a bit better understood. He got what he wanted, even if what he wanted was never quite under his control.

*I had a talking Pee-Wee doll when I was a kid. That doll talked a lot. Eventually, he talked so much that he wouldn’t talk anymore. I tried to nurse that doll back to health for days. It wasn’t until my 30s when I realized my mother probably just removed the batteries and got everybody on board with the con. I did not plan to make this review a lot therapy. But then again, Reubens didn’t really think the film would be confessional, so it all becomes of a piece.

Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Director: Randal Kleiser

Cast: Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Tyrrell, Valeria Golino

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes. It was certainly on a less frequent rotation than Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and I think my copy was actually recorded off of HBO, but only started several minutes into the movie. I have very little memory of the film before the storm comes to blow the circus folk into town.

Did I Like It: I think we all (including the filmmakers, one would imagine) remember this as the inferior Pee-Wee movie. In all honesty I may have never felt the temptation to watch it again if it weren’t for the fact that I just got of a months-long binge of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and needed a fix to wind me down.

I’m happy to report that it isn’t terrible. There’s a goodly amount of whimsy on display, more than a few funny moments, and a concerted display of the ethos which made Pee-Wee so special in the first place:  The idea that weirdos are heroic despite themselves.

And yet, it is inferior, not only to Big Adventure, but also to my memory of the more recent Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Why? First, I think the whimsy and heroic weirdo quotient is turned strangely down. I’m willing to largely write that off to Tim Burton (he had <ghosts-with-the-most> and <batmen> to keep him busy) opting out of the proceedings in favor of Kleiser, a journeyman director if ever there was one. But it goes deeper than that. Pee-Wee is kind of a horndog in this one, where he’s usually written as something of an asexual imp. Even in the original The Pee-Wee Herman Show, he was only horny in as much as he was being a rascal. It was more performative because it was on HBO than anything else.

A brief return to horny Pee-Wee might have been okay if the story was a little tighter. The perfect MacGuffin of the best bike in the whole world is nowhere to be found. Instead, the circus comes to town and, wait for it, put on a circus. That might have worked for a quick segment on Playhouse, but it feels too slight for its own good taken to an hour and a half. I’d say that Reubens might have needed a little bit of a break from his most famous creation, but I think he probably would have agreed with me.