Little Richard and Brooke Shields are not exactly two people I would expect to pair together. They are both icons, sure; albeit for very different reasons. Little Richard (aka Richard Wayne Penniman) is a musical legend whose flamboyant style as a singer and as an entertainer was matched only by the talent of his songwriting and his singing. Shields, on the other hand, was labelled the beauty of a generation and whose zeitgeisty cultural footprint dovetails into a variety of societal taboos that cast a long shadow over the entertainment.
What ties them together in this moment right now is that they are the subjects of two new documentaries...
The pair of movies demonstrate how difficult it is to make a traditional biographical documentaries that doesn’t ultimately come off as slightly, somewhat disappointing. Both Little Richard: I Am Everything and Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields act as worthwhile reminders of their subject’s eternal legacies in the face of an industry all too eager to move on to the next thing. But directors Lisa Cortes and Lana Wilson respectfully are too hemmed in by storytelling structures that take us from the womb and don’t do enough creatively with the material to play as something bigger and more cinematically potent.
They are not unique in this, of course. They follow a long list of bio-docs that have done a great job of condensing a day’s worth of Wikipedia and YouTube wormholing into a single two hours (give or take) of film (the caveat on Pretty Baby being that it is a ‘miniseries’ of two episodes that, combined, equals the length of a feature film so we’re going to categorise it as such). There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that, and for what they are they are technically proficient, often quite captivating films about fascinating subjects. But while watching both, I repeatedly found myself eager for their directors to dive deeper into certain beats of their stories. The more provocative angles found in the life stories of Little Richard and Brooke Shields made me perk up as a viewer, only to have their makers sometimes move on far too quickly because—as famous people are want to do—there’s something else that’s noteworthy that the audience expects to be covered and it’s just around the corner.
In Little Richard: I Am Everything, Cortes charts his life from impoverished childhood to queer musical superstar and later something of a religious zealous who turned his back on his sexuality. Editors Nyneve Laura Minnear and Jake Hostetter use a “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” clip multiple times to demonstrate that latter phase. The fact that he was at the very least bisexual, but presented for much of his life and career (including as a young man without a hit record to his name) as an open and camp homosexual black man is easily the most valuable asset that I Am Everything has in its pocket. Well, that and John Waters. That’s the sort of stuff that would make a great film all on its own, particularly so when we learn of his spent time at a nudge-wink speakeasy in the American south.
Yes, everything else that happened to him is what we would expect to see, but it more or less covers ground that lacks much in the way of genuine revelations. I understand the desire to give Little Richard the tribute that nobody else has really done—maybe Elvis will change somebody’s mind and they’ll give us a dramatic biopic, but to tone down the sexuality would be criminal (and let’s be honest, they probably would). Cortes does try and enliven some of the performances with a sort of firework effect that, I assume, is meant to show how much his work did and still does truly spark. But it comes off as very tame and half-hearted compared to, for instance, the all-body assault of last year’s Moonage Daydream about David Bowie (Bowie was, of course, very influenced by Richard).
Despite its TV origins, Pretty Baby does probably come off best of the two. Wilson has previously done similarly effective work on Miss Americana and After Till, and here she is successful in leveraging Shields’ status as an icon of the modern era whose story wades into thornier themes that have a very right-now contemporary importance.
Weirdly, if you have seen the viral videos of Shields on Drew Barrymore’s talk show, you would have seen some of the edgier material to have come out of the project. Barrymore, who does also appears in the doc as a talking head, and Shields sitting down together on national television to talk about their lives in tandem as child performers who were exploited and placed in dangerous, predatory situations is remarkably the sort of gut-wrenching material that I had perhaps expected from Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.
Enlivened by a plethora of movie clips, commercials, talk show appearances and behind-the-scenes imagery and anecdotes, there is a lot here to stoke conversation. In its best passages, Wilson lets the material and Shields speak for themselves. But elsewhere, it suffers similarly to Little Richard: I Am Everything. Because, okay, we gotta talk about Suddenly Susan, I guess? Shields is the doc’s biggest asset, and she clearly wants to tell a story that reframes her as more than just a pretty face. She even says as much in the movie. But the film sometimes doesn’t let her be. It often feels like it is ever so close to cracking open the egg of truth, like when discussing the cultural impact of Blue Lagoon and Endless Love or the personal and cultural impact of Shields being the star of literal child pornography court case, but pulls back to show us another photoshoot or go on a (long) spin about how Shields’ virginity played out in the press. It is nevertheless, well edited by Sara Newens and Anne Yao who find a good mix between talking heads (including Laura Linney!), clips, archive footage and Shields herself.
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields and Little Richard: I Am Everything are both good movies, but they’re not great. And that’s a shame. Both of their subjects deserve something great.
Release: Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+. Little Richard: I Am Everything is in limited theatrical release as well as available on a whole host of VOD platforms.