Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)
How a Black gay boy from the rural South took rock 'n' roll to the heights
“I’m not conceited; I’m convinced.” The man and the musician believed he was born to please
Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)
In theaters and streaming (for rental or purchase) on Amazon Prime Video
I surely don’t think this documentary is the “final word” on the seismic career of Macon, Georgia’s boy prodigy, Richard Penniman (1932-2020).
It’s a brilliant prod to renew our understanding of him.
We still have a way to go in pinning him down, as this galvanizing, heartbreaking, deeply informative recounting of his life makes plain.
And what a rich store of information it provides us, even as we’re left troubled.
It opens with Richard, perhaps in his late 30s, on a TV talk show playing piano.
In closeup we see his left hand pounding out a thunderous beat while his right hand sends an intricate array of notes rapidly soaring into the air.
I could barely take it all in. I thought, “Where did he learn to play piano like that?”
It happened in his youth in honky-tonks, where he heard inspired fingering ripple from unsung, self-taught experts.
But the need for speed, the reason he played so urgently, sprang from his childhood, from church singing and the feverish body-shaking of a holy congregation.
As a boy in Macon, on Sunday he’d first go to his mother’s solemn Baptist church service where he absorbed the power of the Holy Word.
Immediately afterwards, he’d attend his father’s A.M.E. church assembly, where the congregation got up and danced, letting the Word course through their bodies.
Gospel greats like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward and Marion Williams showed Richard how both forms of worship could blend. The solemn and the slithery. God was in all of it.
Then, wouldn’t you know, came the Devil.
Richard couldn’t resist wearing sparkling jewelry, pancake makeup, glaring lip and eye liner, and, finally, piling his slicked hair into a gleaming pompadour.
Combined with bright suits and two-toned shoes, the look was ravishingly “pretty”.
In full swing and full regalia on an L.A. bandstand (kicking it in two-toned shoes)
Women loved it. So did some men. And Richard fell into a carnality that went with his finery and sex appeal like any other accessory.
He profoundly favored sex with men. He’d known all along he was gay but didn’t have a word for it.
He eventually defined for himself the word and the deeds. Sub textually he imported sexual ambiguity into his stage routines.
The hip-shaking music, with shouted ooohs! darting through the air, created an erotic charge that didn’t exactly have a name. The audience didn’t seem to need one.
Backed by a band he assembled from rowdy amateurs like himself, he started with small gigs, worked his way up across the South and into the North on the Black “Chitlin’ Circuit”.
He slowly earned a reputation as a performer with a powerful, glittering stage presence.
He was pushing lewd lyrics with gospel inflections. And as I watched the electrifying clips here, it struck me that on the one hand he was sly, and on the other he just couldn’t help himself.
His piano playing, to my ears, had a summoning, churchy pull. Under the pounding there was an urgent, You need to hear this!
Then came the records. His first hit, “Tutti Frutti,” was a monster, such a national sensation it was quickly covered by Presley and by Pat Boone.
The song launched Richard’s national career, but, as he later informs us, Presley and Boone actually sold more copies of their shaky covers than the originator himself did.
He liked that word, “originator”. Also “architect”. He went on to become what he described as the founder of rock ’n’ roll, and indeed many of the greats came alongside or followed him.
Chuck Berry, James Brown, Otis Redding and Fats Domino all came in his wake. So did Elvis.
And so did, as we see them acknowledge in interviews here, the Beatles as well as Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.
Subsequently, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Boy George and others developed stage personas that seem unimaginable without Richard as the jittery, jangling template.
These witnesses try, most admitting on camera that they can’t quite succeed, to explain why the Little Richard phenomenon still puzzles, pains and confounds them.
The movie artfully circles around, but can’t seem to bring itself to directly pose, the darkest question: Were Richard’s excesses and his genius inextricably bound together?
Yet, as we’re also shown, the industry was slow to acknowledge the centrality of his achievement, the way that, following in his wake, rock ’n’ roll took young people in America and Europe by storm.
That was because of him, he intensely wanted to point out.
At the same time, as we also see, for Richard knowing the breadth of his achievement wasn’t the same as resting content with it.
Quite the opposite. The dizzying onstage spectacles his shows became also led him to abuse drugs and alcohol in fervid excess, with wild sex orgies thrown in.
He collapsed. He felt Old Satan winning. He went back – inexplicably or inevitably, take your pick – to the church, the Bible, faith in God, hope for salvation from a sinful life.
He cut his hair, lived clean, married, seemed to settle down.
And went broke. The stage called him back. His bank account needed him more than the Lord’s judgment frightened him.
He took himself to England and Germany and found riotous success. He met the Beatles and the Stones, helped both groups launch their careers and returned to America ready to rock again.
The delighted Fab Four hadn’t yet released a record when they met their idol
And again, drugs and sexual profligacy overtook him. Yet one more time he picked up his Bible and renounced the evil merriments of the stage.
But mysteriously, one almost wants to say fatefully, salvation and its hopes couldn’t prevail over the lure of money and onstage dominance.
Up there, as nowhere else, he believed he was a king.
Yet he never won a Grammy. And the life achievement awards late in his career didn’t, in his mind, make up for the earlier neglect.
The hits heard everywhere were gigantic, from “Good Golly, Miss Molly” to “Long Tall Sally” to “Lucille”.
But they didn’t supply all the personal assurance he needed. Missing was a deep-down residual acceptance he’d never gotten from his emotionally strict father.
This sense of incompletion kept him, after marriages, divorces and countless liaisons with men, lonely.
Director Lisa Cortes and her fellow producers put Richard’s travails vividly before us, and make his rollicking, generation-spanning story briskly compelling.
The editing (by Jake Hostetter and Nyneve Laura Minnear) is helpfully dramatic, never flamboyant, and the musical selections, whether historical or performed for the documentary, are moving and thought-provoking.
Little Richard: I Am Everything skillfully interweaves conversations with scholars, music colleagues, friends, industry insiders as well as seasoned musical achievers like Billy Porter, Nona Hendryx and Nile Rodgers.
They all speak soulfully aiming to sort out what made Richard such a stratospheric talent, such a pervasive influence on a whole branch of music.
But in lauding him, they’re also stymied. These witnesses try, most admitting on camera that they can’t quite succeed, to explain why the Little Richard phenomenon still puzzles, pains and confounds them.
Man in the mirror: he struggled all his life to fashion a self he could be content with
Indeed, the movie artfully circles around, but can’t seem to bring itself to directly pose, the darkest question: Were Richard’s excesses and his genius inextricably bound together?
He wasn’t just lightning in a bottle. He was the explosion that happens when the bottle shatters into sparkling shards. He was both originator and self-destroyer.
Yet when performing what a musical dynamo! What whooping, transporting joy he, his piano, his body, his glittering costumes and wall-shaking voice left us with.
In him the sacred and the profane waged a mighty, lifelong tussle. Transfixed, appalled, gloriously entertained, we got to look on.
But this searching documentary forces us to admit that we never saw it all, never got to the axis, the way his pain coupled with and fueled his whirling-dervish performer’s wit.
We’re incalculably grateful for the music.
Still, this invaluable, essential movie leaves us wondering whether Richard’s inner struggle, his trouble in mind, ever really ended.