Little Richard: I Am Everything review – admirable reckoning with an immense musical legacy
Lisa Cortes's documentary paints an impressively complete picture of its remarkable subject, but lacks his magisterial creative verve
When looking back at the history of music, it’d be hard to pick a more singularly influential individual than Little Richard, the man who, for all intents and purposes, invented not just rock and roll, but also the sort of public gender non-conformity that has formed the bedrock of so many of the acts that followed him. It’s an astounding and intimidating legacy, one that Lisa Cortes’s documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything does its very best to live up to, even if it is inherently constrained by the predictability of the music doc format.
Cortes sticks to formula here – this is a cradle to grave biography brought to life by archive footage and talking heads in a way that you’ll be intimately familiar with if you’ve ever put on BBC4 – but with a crucial twist in that she ties Richard’s life story in with the life story of rock and roll itself. As we move through the eras of the genre, from its 50s inception to the 60s British Invasion and beyond, we see how Richard’s styles both evolved with him as a performer and continued to influence his younger counterparts.
It’s a great way to pay tribute to the man, even if the rather staid format does feel incongruous next to his innovative performances (the brief attempts to stylistically liven things up by putting a glittery filter over everything do not help). Of course, Richard himself is consistently fabulous company in the archive footage, bursting with life and very funny, but also deeply melancholy when Cortes turns to the multiple moments in his life where he chose to renounce his queer identity.
The talking heads, meanwhile, are an interesting mix of the megastars Richard inspired, musical historians, and cultural academics, all of whom shed different lights on his multifaceted legacy. To its credit, I Am Everything paints a very complete picture of its subject, but it can’t match his boundless creativity and energy.
Little Richard: I Am Everything is released in UK cinemas on April 28.
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