There’s no way that a documentary about Little Richard, the king, queen, and “architect” (his self-description) of rock and roll, was ever going to be dull, but Lisa Cortes’s study, completed three years after the singer’s death at age 87, is as deep as it is exciting. Anyone with any interest in popular music understands Richard Penniman’s contribution to 20th century culture and maybe even the contradictions within the man himself that fueled his art, but Cortes, with the help of some excellently curated talking heads, keeps her eye on the prize: the perspective of history on a grand scale to explain just how important Richard was to our sense of the way entertainment works on the soul and not just the eyes and the ears. He brought not only black music to millions of teenagers in the 1950s, but queer culture to an even larger audience who likely didn’t know what they were getting, but it wasn’t a stealth action. Richard was never coy about anything, not his talent, not his ribald sexuality, not his deepest fears and anxieties. It was all there in the music and in the public persona. He really was everything, as Mick Jagger says here.

The movie is especially instructive about the environment that produced Little Richard, the Baptist belt of Georgia where he started cross-dressing as a child, inviting derision and disgust from his own father, who eventually grew proud of his son when he showed promise as an entertainer just before he was shot to death in an altercation. Richard studied Sister Rosetta Tharpe for her gospel spirit and took style cues from the singer Billy Wright, not to mention piano lessons from the flamboyant R&B performer Esquerita. After hiring a band and touring the Chitlin’ circuit, he eventually came to the attention of white record companies, who initially thought he could be a blues artist simply because they hadn’t even conceived of rock and roll. It took a cleaned up version of “Tutti Frutti,” an original song originally about anal sex, to make them understand, and it not only turned out to be a crossover hit, but paved the way for every raveup that came barrelling down the pike, including those produced by white boys like Elvis and, the biggest insult, Pat Boone, who basically stole Richard’s repertoire while stripping it of everything that made it thrilling. Certainly the most indelible influence Richard had was on Paul McCartney, who not only learned Richard’s scream from the source, but whose band, the Beatles, received their rock education in the sinful port city of Hamburg, a gig that Richard was instrumental in setting up. But as the movie shows again and again and again, Richard never really benefited from his trailblazing idiosyncrasies except on a temporary, fleeting basis. He was constantly being cheated out of credit or royalties or both, and he knew it. It sparked his resentment and messed with his self-esteem, causing him to give up rock and roll several times in favor of Christian salvation—and then, either because he needed money or, as he once so famously sang, “the girl can’t help it,” he came back again randy and outspoken. 

He openly admitted to being gay and then denounced his homosexuality unequivocally. He gave up secular music and entered a seminary, only to return in the mid-60s as flashy and opinionated as ever. He married a good woman whom he always respected (even after the inevitable divorce) and yet adored queer acts like the trans performer Lady Java, a lifelong friend and confidante. Cortes examines these switch-ups with a clinical attention to detail that gets at the emotional extremes of Richard’s temperament, and interviews people who not only have things to say about his place in history and explain what he brought to the culture, but also how the experience affected him without fundamentally changing him. If the movie has a flaw it’s that the performances are taken for granted, but even in short clips they put paid to his boasts. He really was everything, and then some.

Opens March 1 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).

Little Richard: I Am Everything home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Cable News Network Inc. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company