Lit­tle Richard: I Am Everything

With­out undu­ly den­i­grat­ing the achieve­ments of Richard Wayne Pen­ni­man, – or, the artist for­mer­ly known as Lit­tle Richard – there was a per­cep­tion that he was a one-of-a-kind musi­cal fire­crack­er who dined out on a small clutch of clas­sic tunes for near­ly 70 years.

Unlike many of his jad­ed peers, Richard was some­one who would blast out ​‘Good Gol­ly Miss Mol­ly’ in 2006 with the same inten­si­ty and pas­sion as he did in 1956. What you might read from this is that he was supreme­ly proud and pro­tec­tive of his cul­tur­al lega­cy, and Lisa Cortes’ new pro­file doc­u­men­tary, Lit­tle Richard: I Am Every­thing, says, cor­rect – and he has every right to be.

Things begin with a cus­tom­ary love-in as a gag­gle of rock ​‘n’ roll dinos take turns to laud Richard and his for­ma­tive inno­va­tions in the field of Rock ​‘n’ Roll. Yet the film seems to want to get that hagio­graph­ic stuff off the table quick­ly in order to mount a more in-depth and ana­lyt­i­cal take on the Lit­tle Richard sto­ry – one which aligns more neat­ly with his famous­ly-licen­tious 1984 mem­oir, ​‘The Life and Times of Lit­tle Richard: The Quasar of Rock’.

Celebri­ty fans are nudged to the side in favour of con­tri­bu­tions from a num­ber of cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans and aca­d­e­mics who are able to con­tex­tu­alise Richard’s strange jour­ney and explore the wider ram­i­fi­ca­tions of his work with much more orig­i­nal­i­ty and objec­tiv­i­ty. It’s refresh­ing to see a film like this which opts for an edi­to­r­i­al line that’s not just wall-to-wall cel­e­bra­tion, and actu­al­ly attempts to dis­man­tle and dis­sect its sub­ject rather than mere­ly lionise him to the hilt.

It’s an added bonus that Lit­tle Richard had such a long and event­ful life (a mas­sive under­state­ment), the main seam of which seems to be an extend­ed tus­sle with sex­u­al self-iden­ti­ty. One minute he’ll be ask­ing his pro­duc­tion team to make him into a flam­ing icon and be sure that all his gaudy stage cos­tumes con­tain frills, tas­sels and mir­rors. The next, he’ll be on a TV chat show in his new for­mal guise as an evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor drop­ping homo­pho­bic clangers such as, ​“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

There’s always a sense, how­ev­er, that Richard was attempt­ing to find some diplo­mat­ic mid­dle ground where his pri­vate life and the image he pro­ject­ed didn’t dis­rupt his art – espe­cial­ly as a way for him to make mon­ey. He was a jok­er and a teas­er, and even though he con­stant­ly claimed that he’s not ​“con­trived,” there’s some­thing that feels expert­ly stage-man­aged and pre­cise about how he pre­sent­ed him­self to the pub­lic. It may be a cliché to site the clown who’s cry­ing on the inside, but it’s not far off…

Praise, too, goes to the film’s deci­sion to use Richard as an exam­ple of how the work of Black inno­va­tors was often plun­dered and repack­aged by white coun­ter­parts who inevitably man­aged to par­lay it into much more suc­cess­ful careers. It’s hard­ly a rev­e­la­tion to be told how much The Bea­t­les or The Rolling Stones were influ­enced by their love of Black music, but the film makes the case for this form of cul­tur­al smash-and-grab as being endem­ic, and it wasn’t just Lit­tle Richard who was being ripped off.

These wel­come diver­sions into musi­col­o­gy dull the acid bit­ter­ness of dif­fi­cult scenes from Richard’s lat­er years. It seems that how­ev­er hard the indus­try worked to make amends and give him his just desserts, he right­ly pinged back their plat­i­tudes and asked the ques­tion: why are you doing this now? And what is the real val­ue of all of this? Is this to make you look good, or me? His avun­cu­lar façade and glib repar­tee go some way to mask some of his clear frus­tra­tions, but it’s cer­tain­ly under­stand­able that he would use these plat­forms as a way to reflect the hypocrisy of his peers right back at them.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.