MIFF Session 10: LITTLE RICHARD - I AM EVERYTHING

The reason for me to watch a documentary like this is to address gaps in my knowledge and to see if there are insights that might surprise me. I don't hold any documentary to those as standards, just chuffed when they appear. What I know of Little Richard is that his music and persona helped push the vessel of rock music in to orbit, that his nursery rhyme lyrics contained such sexuality that the whitebread artists like Pat Boone who covered him would've run screaming from the mic if they'd known. I knew that he renounced rock and roll as a sinful practice when in Australia, casting his mass of finger bling into Sydney Harbour in the early '60s and drove the wilder side of British music making through his tours, influencing the likes of The Beatles, Stones and Bowie. 

What I didn't know was that, when he resumed rock music for those tours of the UK etc. he was doing it through a kind of double think that permitted being a flamboyant rocker and a religiously devoted Christian. I didn't know his all but open gayness waws all but accepted the way Rock Hudson's was and that, when he was finally allowed by his society to express it, he had rolled back into the Christian shell, trying to renounce that, too. Little Richard's case is a complex one, the magnetic shouting voice at the centre of his songs told of these experiences with such a joy that the pain of it remained invisible through most of his time on Earth.

This means that there is a lot to talk about. Archival footage of the artist himself features him turned up to eleven with each clip. If anyone had successfully interviewed him in a quieter, soberer moment it hasn't turned up. But then, he was interviewed because he was dependably on eleven. What we are presented with is a trove of collaborators from his career and well chosen figures from now who present reflections which range from smoke blowing to insightful as the constant barraging clip show flashes on.

What this feels like at heart is an attempt to redress imbalance in the historical record. When Little Richard gets the mic at an awards ceremony and lectures the glitzy crowd with an account of his importance, he isn't just boasting, he knows his story has not been fully told. It might be bravura but it never comes across as narcissistic.

I don't know if we were served a premastered copy or that the assembly of archival and new material proved impossible to normalise (that's an audio term, btw), but while Mick Jagger's or Nile Rodgers'  accounts were pristinely clean, clips from the eighties back were often plagued by dull sound. I'm aware that this could be due to the state of preservation of the material but so much is possible now that wasn't only five years ago. I'll cease this whinge and say instead that the wealth of media on show with this rose above the limitations of the presentation. We get a lot of context for the life of a highly complex man and its exhilarating.