Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’ on HBO Max, A Doc About A True King Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Boldly Told With A Touch Of Impressionism

Little Richard: I Am Everything (now streaming on Max, formerly known as HBO Max), directed and co-produced by Emmy winner Lisa Cortés (The Apollo), tackles the life and legacy of the man born Richard Wayne Penniman. As Little Richard, the pianist, singer, and songwriter barrelled out of Macon, Georgia with a pencil mustache and the smash 1955 single “Tutti Frutti.” He changed teenage horniness forever, gave breath to the burgeoning spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, perpetually challenged the white establishment, reckoned with his own identity as a gay Black man living a very public life, and was completely not ever shy about any of it. “I’m the emancipator,” Richard says in an archival clip in I Am Everything. “I’m the architect. I’m the one that started it all.” 

LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Little Richard passed away in 2020 at age 83. And by that time, his status as a foundational force for what would become rock ‘n’ roll music was pretty fully established. The gratitude of fellow musicians, both his contemporaries and those who came after. Accolades from the larger music industry. And a spot in the first-ever Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. But as Little Richard: I Am Everything notes, the singer with the larger than life personality spent much of his adult life crafting his legacy over and over again. He performed in makeup and fancy threads. He wrote wild and rhythmic songs full of sexual energy that delighted teens, terrified the establishment, and delivered a tool kit for success to the white musicians who co-opted this Black-made music. But it took ages for Richard to receive his due, and to attempt to come to terms with who he really was as a person.

“Black music is the wellspring of American popular music,” ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley says in I Am Everything. But then as now, the contributions of Black creators would often go unrecognized by the record industry and society. In the 1950s, as Richard tore up the charts with incendiary singles like “Tutti Frutti,” “Lucille,” and “Long Tall Sally,” he understood innately how to code the suggestive nature of his lyrics for larger consumption, and embraced an exaggerated queerness that despite its radicalness was also a form of staying non-threatening to white listeners. But playing dates in Hamburg with a baby version of The Beatles or doing a tour of England with opening act The Rolling Stones marked the transference of his musical and performative powers to new groups of innovators. And as Richard’s influence declined throughout the 1960s, he was set adrift on a personal and professional level.

What I Am Everything finds in its subject is a man who saw the rise of guys like the Fab Four or Elvis Presley and was like (rightly), “What about me?” In typical Little Richard fashion, he leaned into it, balancing stretches of sweaty, piano-standing performances on the secular side of things with periodic turns toward gospel music and the church — Everything renders his conversion experience with a distinctive visual  touch —  drug addictions brought about by insecurity and family tragedies, and a return to the spotlight in the 1980s with greater perspective but also a continued need to advocate for his legacy. And alongside that narrative is always the appreciation of Richard’s commitment to creativity, to leaving it all on the line for a performance, to the connection he felt with God and the universe at an atomic level. After all of this remains the whole reason why he got into it, with his legendary voice and the keys of a piano there to transmit. “This Black music was so intense! It was so full of rhythm. It was so full of a fervency and having fun!” 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Last summer, the American Masters documentary Little Richard: King & Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll appeared via PBS with its own discussion of the groundbreaking singer and performer’s life and work. And the touches of Impressionism in Everything that explore Richard’s creative spark echo the cosmic vibes and visuals of the recent docuseries Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity. 

Performance Worth Watching: “Shut up.” Little Richard popularized the phrase, often deploying it as a comic put-down of the audiences he was appearing before, and I Am Everything builds in a great supercut of the singer hitting this laugh line with perfection at concerts, awards shows, and in live television interviews. As scholar Tavia Nyong’o and others observe, how Richard used the phrase declared him as definitely not straight. But the fact that he otherwise rarely spoke about his sexuality so openly also brought with it complications.  

Memorable Dialogue: Of the culture Little Richard came up in and factors that helped define him – an abusive father, a racially segregated country, and the expectations of the churchgoing community – scholar Zandria Robinson says the American South “is the home of all things queer. Of the different, of the non-normative, of the other side, of the Gothic, of the grotesque. Note that queerness is not just about sexuality, but about a presence in a space that is different from we require or expect. Different from the norm.”

Sex & Skin: Before it was cleaned up for wider release, the original lyric of Little Richard’s 1955 single was “Tutti Frutti, good booty,” so it’s not like he was ever demure. Basically it was a song about penetration, says scholar Jason King. A song about anal sex that became a huge hit single, and that for young Black and white audiences gave voice to post-Second World War yearning, unbound teenage horniness, and the desire to be erotically free.

Also, orgies. More than once in I Am Everything, Little Richard expresses his continued interest and participation in orgies.

Our Take: There are lots of famous faces in I Am Everything who help to tell Little Richard’s story. Billy Porter, Mick Jagger, John Waters, and Tom Jones; members of Richard’s old road band the Upsetters; and those who knew him in his personal life, like Lee Angel and dancer and transgender activist Sir Lady Java, are all on hand to contextualize the singer and performer’s legacy. Facing the challenges he did, Porter says, and always doing it in public? Well, “sometimes simply existing is a revolutionary act.” Everything is adept at weaving these moments of commentary into its wealth of deeply sourced archival footage — early live performances that absolutely rip, plus interviews with Richard that reveal someone who never expressed himself at anything less than full volume. But it also highlights the contributions of academics and other thinkers, all of whom offer valuable perspective not only on Richard himself and the decisions he made in his life — decisions that came as much from delight as they did terror— but also how crucial his work remains to the artform known as rock ‘n’ roll. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Little Richard: I Am Everything features a chorus of voices to tell the true story of how a singer and piano player did it his own way. all the time, and became the architect of rock music in the process. But ultimately, the loudest voice in Everything is Richard’s own.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.