Review: 'Little Richard: I Am Everything' Delves into a Rich, Complicated Life

Watch the trailer to 'Little Richard: I Am Everything'

All American music was created by Black artists: Blues, gospel, ragtime, jazz, R&B, rock, hip-hop, house, rap. Groundbreaking African American musician Little Richard had to remind his listeners of that fact, with limited success throughout his storied career. He was also gay, part of another marginalized community and culture that Americans tend to appropriate but not congratulate. His stellar showmanship and personal demons are explored in Lisa Cortes' poignant and dynamic documentary "Little Richard: I Am Everything," replete with glittering interstitials reminiscent of the star's costumes.

Interviewees include Mick Jagger, who acknowledges that his strut was inspired by Richard; Billy Porter, who pays homage to Richard's ethos; and filmmaker John Waters, who credits Richard with many inspirations, including for his movie (then musical, and then back again to musical movie) "Hairspray," as well as his signature pencil moustache. Many recognize that Little Richard – born as Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Georgia – created the rock icon template, and is referred to by many as the emancipator, and the architect of modern music. One notes that he was "a comet, a quasar, and his DNA is everywhere."

Little Richard led a bifurcated life, as both a delight and a terror, equally at home with his bible or at an orgy (he often had both in the same room). He was born poor (and slightly deformed, with one arm shorter than the other) in 1932, one of 12 siblings with a minister father, who also owned a nightclub and sold bootleg alcohol. His dad put him out when Richard came out wearing his mother's jewelry. A white woman took him in, and he stayed at her speakeasy.

Out on his own, he decided to go into music after watching folks like pioneering gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was the mother of rock guitar and drummed on the piano so hard she reached an "ecstatic space." After changing his name, Little Richard hit the Chitlin' Circuit with acts like Sugar Foot Sam from Alabam (sic), where he also picked up his pompadour hairstyle from flamboyant queer singer Esquerita. An archival interview recalls "mirrors come into your life to show you who you really are."

After some managers tried to have him imitate slow blues riffs, Richard created his own sound with his first band, appropriately called The Upsetters. It was "music infused with joy and post-war aching teenage horniness." The industry labeled it "race music," yet kids went outside of their boxes to find it with independent DJs and from car radios. Waters remembers hearing the music on Baltimore's three Black radio stations, where "even racists liked the sound."

Elvis and even Pat Boone covered his first big hit "Tutti Frutti." Even though Richard didn't receive all the residuals he deserved, he still earned enough to finally move himself and his family to Riverside, California. Richard continued to spin influences into his own singular sound. "But he wasn't just a collection," one interviewee observes. "He made a gumbo that was uniquely his own." His look morphed, too, and everybody in the band echoed Richard's big hair and makeup styles.

But during an Australian tour, he saw angels with a fireball and had a religious epiphany. Once back in the States, he went to conservative Seventh Day Adventist Oakwood College, where he cut his hair, burned his records, and lived in a dorm. He started performing gospel music and married Ernestine Harvin in 1959.

Richard returned to his musical life and London in 1962, where he took the Beatles to tour Hamburg with his organist Billy Preston. Paul McCartney copied Richard's howls in his emerging stage persona. The Rolling Stones opened for Richard in his second UK tour. Yet, Richard's fame was not the same as it had been in the '50s. His mirror ball-inspired suits and catch phrase, "Shut up!," encapsulated his flamboyance and his frustration.

In the 1970s, Richard used cocaine, PCP, and heroin. His brother Tony and several dealer friends overdosed. So he went back to church and renounced his queerness. "But how much was running to God or simply running away from himself?" an interviewee asks. Richard had to go back to work because he had broken his contract and lost all previous royalties. When MTV debuted in 1981, Richard had to watch budding video stars steal his schtick, including Michael Jackson, Prince, and David Bowie, who specifically asked producer Nile Rodgers for a Richard-like look and sound for his "Modern Love" song.

Richard was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, but couldn't attend because he had wrecked his car in Hollywood. His music and style innovations became "the oxygen of American popular music" in the 1980s and '90s, with Black rock bands like Living Colour, Bad Brains, and Fishbone. "Everything is defined by Little Richard," one person says, even though he struggled to find peace within his divisive passions. "When he is fully himself, he is closest to God," another says.

My uncle Tommy gifted me my first 45 record: Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti." I wore it out because it was a jam, what with the "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-lop-bam-boom," a driving locomotive backbeat, and those glorious WOOOs. This documentary, a crucial historical testament, lets viewers know that the original lyric was about anal sex, a shorthand for the powerful dichotomy that was Little Richard, who continuously blended the sacred and profane. Rock and roll didn't start with Elvis, Billy Porter reminds us, but with Richard.

"Little Richard: I Am Everything" comes to theaters April 11 and streams on digital and HBO Max starting April 21.