98 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures
Little Richard invents rock and roll, then watches white performers get rich playing his music. Lisa Cortes builds a documentary that drags the queer Black architect of the genre back to the center of the frame. The history books spent seventy years writing him out. This puts him back.
Little Richard pounds the piano, screams into the microphone, and creates the template every rock star uses for the next half century. He is queer, Black, and from the Jim Crow South. The industry takes his sound, hands it to Pat Boone and Elvis Presley, and lets them collect the credit. Lisa Cortes structures the film around that theft and the man who never stopped demanding his due. The argument is sharp. Little Richard is not a footnote to rock and roll. He is its foundation, and the genre spent decades pretending otherwise.
The archival Little Richard carries the film through his own voice. He swings between sermon and showmanship, claiming his throne in one interview and renouncing it in the next. Mick Jagger and Tom Jones describe watching him perform and understanding what a frontman could be. Billy Porter speaks to the cost of being flamboyant and Black before the culture had words for it. Nile Rodgers and John Waters trace the influence forward into glam and punk and disco. The talking heads stay subordinate to the man himself, which is the correct choice.
Cortes writes and directs the film as a corrective rather than a celebration. She cuts the archival concert footage against the cover versions that outsold the originals, and the editing makes the erasure impossible to miss. The film tracks Little Richard’s repeated cycle between the stage and the pulpit, between embracing his sexuality and condemning it. Cortes refuses to flatten those contradictions into a clean arc. The restored performance footage gives the music its physical force, and the sound design lets the screams hit at full volume.
This is a film about who gets to own an art form and who gets paid for it. Little Richard knew what he built and spent his life watching others profit from it. Cortes does not turn him into a saint or a victim. She lets him be loud, contradictory, and impossible to ignore, which is how he wanted it. The film makes the case that the history of rock and roll is incomplete until it starts with him.