Little Richard in the 1950s, as seen in Little Richard: I Am Everything (Sundance Institute)

The life and career of musician Little Richard, born Richard Penniman, lives up to the dense documentary’s title, and he’s more than ready for his close-up. Smoothly entertaining and fast-paced, Lisa Cortés’s film thrives on her quotable and boisterous subject, whether in concert or on 1970s/1980s talk shows, when celebrities would plug nothing but themselves. Compared to her subject’s boasting and banter (“I’m not conceited: I’m convinced”), Cortés takes on a more subdued mission, to place Little Richard, the self-described “bronze Liberace,” as the top influencer of the rock and roll pyramid. 

He has quite a fan club that make up the talking heads here, all backing up his claim that “I am the one who started it all,” including Tom Jones, Mick Jagger, Nona Hendryx, David Bowie, and, no surprise, John Waters, who has worn a pencil-thin mustache for decades in Little Richard’s honor for giving him the “fuel to rebel.” None other than Elvis Presley proclaimed the musician “will always be the true king of rock and roll,” as witnessed by a tour manager. 

Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1932, Little Richard was one of 12 kids. Growing up, he spent his Sundays going to the Baptist Church with his mother and then crossing the street to hear his minister father preach at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. (Dad also ran a bootleg house.) Unintentionally, the film serves as a crash course for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic. Both films pay tribute to the early 1950s rhythm and blues musicians who laid down the foundation for rock and roll. Cortés’s film tips the hat to the electric guitar strumming Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other queer Black women who toured on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit—Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan—counting them all as strong influences. (The first time Little Richard performed on stage was with Tharpe.) 

With the assist of academics who were born decades after the musician’s heyday, the director traces the formation of Little Richard’s in-your-face, flamboyant, persona to the early 1950s Black queer scene in the South, pointing out the pompadoured Billy Wright, wearing pancake make-up and mascara, and Esquerita and his pencil-thin mustache as role models. In doing so, scholar/sociologist Zandria Robinson shuts down the idea that the up-and-comer from Macon stole from these two relatively unknown artists. Instead, Robinson posits they became a mirror, a reflection of him. 

Little Richard performed in drag as Princess Lavonne and washed dishes at a Greyhound bus Station before he became a headliner with his own band and rose to the top of the 1950s pop charts with “Tutti Frutti.” In order for this raucous celebration of anal sex to air on the radio, the lyrics were cleaned up, with an assist by songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie. (Google the original verses.) Though he often tore off his shirt and was hardly the boy next door, he came off as non-threatening, perhaps because of the eyeliner and makeup, for which he paid a price. He was arrested in Texas for having long hair, and was beaten in Augusta, Georgia, by the police in the late ’50s.

Much of this biography covers the well-trod show biz terrain of bad contracts, drug addiction, and money woes, but underlying its time line is the musician’s embrace and rejection of his gay identity. While on tour in Australia, he saw a fireball in the sky and thought the world was ending, and abruptly stepped down from stardom. Returning to the States, he attended a Seventh-day Adventist school in 1957, eschewing his repertoire, what he called “devil music,” and eventually married. Yet, needing money and not being an ordained minister, he hit the road in early-1960s England. Under the management of Brian Epstein, he went up north to Liverpool: The Beatles, and later the Rolling Stones, opened for him—yes, he taught Paul McCartney how to “woo.” By the mid-1960s, he became known as the Living Flame and was openly gay, at least for a time.

In the 1970s, after riding high on cocaine, PCP, and heroin, he went back on the straight and narrow and turned back to his faith. In the 1980s, he declared he was no longer gay, renouncing his sexuality on The David Letterman Show. Historian Jason King sums up the documentary’s takeaway: Little Richard “was good at liberating other people. He was not good at liberating himself.” 

Fortunately, many of Little Richard’s contemporaries and intimate friends appear before the director’s camera, all looking back with fondness and appreciation for his career and an understanding of his back-and-forth acceptance/rejection of his sexuality, such as early LGBTQ activist Sir Lady Java. (One band member quips that it was not unusual to see an orgy going on in the singer’s hotel room while a Bible rested on the nightstand.) Archival footage of interviews of his wife, LaBostrie, band mates, and an unexpurgated Little Richard (“Everybody loves to masturbate”) provide more depth than the average music documentary.

Though the exuberant film offers a sweeping view of late 20th century pop culture, at times the academic discussion of Little Richard’s ambivalent or vacillating attitude toward his homosexuality comes across as though it occurred in the distant past, even though the musician passed away only in 2020. One doesn’t have to search far for other documentaries that focus on the ongoing reconciliation, or lack thereof, of religious faith and sexuality or gender identity. 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted a Culture dives deeply into the very biblical verses that have been used to stigmatize homosexuality. An evangelical mother leaves her church to become an advocate for her elementary school-age transgender child in Mama Bears. And currently streaming on Netflix, Pray Away gives voice to evangelical Christians who underwent conversion therapy and survived to become opponents of this “treatment,” just to name three titles.