How did Richard Penniman, the third of 12 children born to a preacher/bootlegger in Macon, Georgia, at the height of segregation, become one of the first rock & roll stars? That’s the question asked and somewhat answered by Little Richard: I Am Everything.
Writing a history of rock & roll without a long chapter on Little Richard would be heresy, and this documentary does everything it can to remind the music world that he was a lot more than the guy that wrote “Tutti Frutti.” This was the man who snuck Black queer culture into the mainstream (read: white) media, a wellspring of flamboyance, an inspiration and mentor to everyone from Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles.
Yet Little Richard: I Am Everything is caught somewhere between a standard modern rock bio doc and post-Moonage Daydream impressionism, with a certain visual flair that, sadly, cannot match up with Brett Morgen’s vibrant history of David Bowie. And that’s disappointing, because if anyone deserves grand insights mixed with visual rule-breaking then it’s probably Little Richard. Worse, those moments end up feeling intrusive and somewhat self-serving, such as inserts of modern musicians doing cover versions, surrounded by CGI magic dust.
Those fantastical efforts get in the way of the exploration into the psychology of Little Richard. I Am Everything is most fascinating when it goes deep into his formative years and the influences of truly obscure figures like Esquerita and Billy Wright (both Black queer musicians). Yet the further into his life the documentary goes, the less insightful it becomes.
Where it works best is as a ticktock history of his life and career, putting into context how he made the jump from the Chitlin’ Circuit to the hit parade and Vegas runs. Yet the drama of I Am Everything is predicated on the idea that the music industry was in on a decades-long conspiracy to erase Little Richard’s influence, impact, and importance, reducing the barriers in his way to faceless “thems” and occasionally relying on some very dubious historical revisionism. Worse, there’s little real analysis of his own self-destructive tendencies. He was as much at war with himself as he was with the music business, the devout believer raised in the Southern evangelical traditions who was also a libertine and a peacock. His life ricocheted between outrageous shirtless performances and publicly denouncing his own experiences as a queer Black man (so separate are these sides of himself that he even sang rock and gospel in different registers). Maybe he was always impossible to understand except as contradictions, yet Little Richard: I Am Everything should be more meaningful than it is descriptive.
This article appears in April 28 • 2023.
