One Of 2025’s Finest (And Most Vital) Documentaries Is Taking Over HBO Max

As Satisfaction Month 2025 will get underway, it is tough to know the best way to really feel. With information tales about members of the U.S. authorities passing anti-trans legal guidelines or bolstering anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment popping up on a near-daily foundation, the plain response is for queer folks and their allies to be louder and prouder than ever. However that is simpler mentioned than achieved, particularly when incidents like actor Jonathan Joss’ loss of life as the results of an alleged hate crime are a stark reminder that the mere act of present can nonetheless be sufficient to get queer folks killed.

The query of the best way to reside as a queer particular person, whether or not your life is consistently underneath a microscope or not, lies on the coronary heart of “Pee-wee as Himself.” Director Matt Wolf’s two-part documentary concerning the life and instances of the late and, it ought to go with out saying, nice Paul Reubens has been garnering common reward since making its world premiere at this 12 months’s Sundance Movie Competition, so it was solely to be anticipated that Warner Bros. Discovery would roll it out on streaming simply in time for Satisfaction Month. WBD CEO David Zaslav and his regime could not know the best way to identify a streaming service, however they certain as heck know the best way to manipulate a marginalized group for his or her profit. (Do not suppose we forgot about that “Our Flag Means Loss of life” stunt renewal you pulled for Satisfaction 2022.)

In fact, simply because its streaming rollout was a calculated technique would not make “Pee-wee as Himself” any much less impactful and essential than it’s. That is why it is gratifying to see the movie is rating amongst HBO Max’s prime 10 most-streamed TV reveals as of June 4, 2025, as reported by FlixPatrol. (Once more, it is actually a two-part documentary characteristic and never a collection, however we’ll take the win all the identical.)

How do you make an intimate, insightful documentary about an artist who intentionally went out of their option to maintain their private life out of the limelight? Reubens famously spent extra time showing in-character on speak reveals, attending film premieres, and even co-starring in different movies (like “Cheech and Chong’s Subsequent Film,” as Wolf’s documentary recounts) as his beloved man-child alter ego, Pee-wee Herman, relatively than himself. In a must-read piece he wrote for Vulture, Wolf revealed in larger depth simply how difficult it was to make the movie — a lot much less get his topic to speak about his sexuality and love life on-camera — as a consequence of Reubens’ self-confessed want to take care of strict management of his narrative always.

So, relatively than resisting the tide, Wolf deftly went with the stream and made Reubens’ hesitancy to speak about himself the main focus of the movie virtually as a lot because the precise occasions of his life. “Pee-wee as Himself” additionally makes its painfully apparent the place Reubens’ evasiveness got here from: As a homosexual man who, by his personal admission, was as out and proud as one could possibly be, he elected to go “again into the closet” and deliberately keep away from having romantic relationships of any form with a purpose to maintain the general public’s eyes mounted squarely on his profession (and, for a very long time, his Pee-wee persona with it). And the 2 events he misplaced management of his narrative? He was arrested on both patently absurd or completely false grounds not-so-secretly fueled by homophobia and suffered significantly for it.

I will not spoil the conclusion to Wolf and Reubens’ power-struggle over who is actually in command of shaping “Pee-wee as Himself” (although, honest warning, there is a robust probability you will end up shedding a tear by the point the credit begin rolling). I will merely say Wolf succeeds in portray a phenomenal, richly sophisticated portrait of a one-of-a-kind soul right here and, in doing so, permits Reubens to impart one final present to the group of weirdos and outsiders who cherished him a lot in life.

As for the truth that Reubens did not reside to see the film himself? Nicely, as Pee-wee as soon as put it, “I haven’t got to see it, Dottie. I lived it.”