In his high school yearbook, Bob Dylan wrote that his ambition was “to join Little Richard.” The first song Paul McCartney performed in public was Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” (which was also the very last song the Beatles ever played on stage). David Bowie said that without Little Richard, “I wouldn’t have gone into music.” Jimi Hendrix played in Richard’s band, until he got fired, and James Brown’s big break came as a Little Richard impersonator.
So when one of the commentators in the new documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything asserts that “his DNA is everywhere,” he’s not exaggerating. The turbocharged force of nature born Richard Wayne Penniman proudly, constantly, told everyone who would listen that he was “the innovator, the originator, the emancipator, the architect” of rock & roll. But when he died in 2020, director Lisa Cortés noted that despite the wide range of tributes being paid to this towering pioneer, not only was there no Little Richard biopic (unlike his contemporaries Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis), but no one had attempted a documentary.
“As a filmmaker, it’s catnip to have such a big story to explore,” says Cortés. “But it's also scary because you can't tell everything. So that was a unique challenge—what is the lens, who has agency, who has the mic? And what is going to be revelatory about an individual and the effects of their being such a transgressive figure on culture?”
In the case of Little Richard, Cortés (co-director of All In: The Fight for Democracy, producer of the Emmy-winning The Apollo, and an executive producer of Oscar winner Precious) was signing up for a big job. There’s the need to address the underappreciated legacy of an artist who looked and sounded like nothing that had come before—a whirlwind of excess and showmanship, blessed with untamable wildness and one of the greatest pure singing voices in pop history. Through well-chosen clips and interviews with Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, and Nile Rodgers, Cortés illustrates the infinite influence of Little Richard, beyond the more obvious acolytes (Hendrix, Prince, Michael Jackson) all the way up through Lil Nas X, Harry Styles, and Lizzo.
The director, who started her career in the music industry, notes that by the time she was growing up in the ‘80s, Richard had largely been reduced to a one-note caricature, perpetually shouting “Shut up!” on talk shows. “Making this film was an opportunity to really distill him to his essence,” she says, “and to see that his essence contains multitudes. Unfortunately, I think for many people, all that they related was the surface performance, and didn't give any greater space to his depth.”
But the film’s more complicated project is unpacking Richard’s contradictory, tortured relationship to his own sexuality. As Little Richard: I Am Everything demonstrates, he took inspiration, in both style and identity, from brave gay musicians who preceded and encouraged him, and even worked in drag as Princess LaVonne on the Southern “chitlin’ circuit.” For decades, though, he alternated between celebrating and disavowing his homosexuality.
In one archival clip, he argues that he was better accepted as a result of emphasizing his queerness (“If I didn’t look feminine, I couldn’t work the white clubs”); in another, he tells David Letterman that “I was one of the first gay people to come out” before “God let me know that he made Adam to be with Eve, not Steve!” And at the peak of his fame, he has a vision that angels save his flight to Australia from crashing, renounces rock & roll and its decadent lifestyle, and enrolls in Bible school.
“To tell this story with richness. I had to look at Richard’s words,” says Cortés. “Richard’s like ‘Yeah, I used to be gay, but I'm not gay anymore—it's an abomination.’ I'm not going to bowdlerize his story, but I'm letting him tell it.”
With his high pompadour and mascara, Richard’s use of queer aesthetics is apparent, but his actual relationships are more confusing to consider. In the film, we hear from his longtime companion, Lee Angel, that she was “the love of his life,” and from his former wife, Ernestine, who contacted the production just as the film was wrapping to add her thoughts.
Cortés points out the importance of Sir Lady Java, a groundbreaking trans performer who befriended Richard soon after he moved with his family from Macon, Georgia, to Los Angeles in 1959. “She tells the truth about the harm he caused, but she understood that he wasn't strong enough,” the director says. “Lady Java is really speaking for his experiences as a gay person in a way that he publicly did not speak about that much.”
Professor, musician, and journalist Jason King offers a succinct statement of Little Richard’s profound dilemma. “He was very, very good at liberating other people through his example,” he says. “He was not good at liberating himself.” (King is one of a group of intentionally chosen young Black and queer scholars who offer commentary throughout the documentary.)
Through all his internal tension, there’s always the sheer power of watching Little Richard himself. Whenever he comes on screen—performing or just talking (to the extent that there’s a difference)—it’s impossible to look away. The hair, the eyes, the suits, the piano playing, the persona, and, of course, the singing…there has simply never been anyone like him.
“With this film. I want you to feel the joy, I want you to feel the conflict and the power of the music,” says Cortés. “It's more than cradle-to-grave, ‘Tutti Frutti,’ ‘Jenny Jenny,’ then he's on Pee-wee Herman. He's got nuances and layers or—here’s a new word that was introduced to me today—he is imbricated. It's like the tiles on a roof, layered on top of one another.
“How do you build an art form and a genre?,” she continues. “It’s not just floor-by-floor. There’s an inner structural integrity that Richard brought to the music. And in keeping with Richard's anarchic spirit, I want to shake it up.”
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April 19, 2023 at 12:38AM
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Little Richard: The Riveting Showmanship and Tortured Sexuality That Built Rock and Roll - Vanity Fair
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