Some bio documentaries are carried mostly by archival footage that send you back to the subject’s heyday.

But in Matt Wolf’s “Pee-wee as Himself” — as wonderful as much of the archival stuff is — nothing is more compelling than when Paul Reubens is simply himself.

Before his death from cancer in 2023, Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews with Wolf. His cooperation is clearly uncertain and sometimes strained in the film — he stopped participating for a year before talking about his infamous 2001 arrest — and his doubts on the project linger throughout.

Reubens would rather be directing it himself, he says more than once. The man many know as Pee-wee Herman is used to controlling his own image, and he has good reason for being skeptical of others doing so. But beyond that tension over authorship of his story, Reubens is delightfully resistant to playing the part of documentary cliche.

“I was born in 1938 in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi River,” he begins. “My father worked on a steamboat.”

Pee-wee may be iconic, but Paul Reubens is hysterical. And Wolf’s film, with that winking title, makes for a revealing portrait of a performer who so often put persona in front of personhood. In that way, “Pee-wee as Himself,” a two-part documentary, is moving as the posthumous unmasking of a man you can’t help but wish we had known better.

Reubens grew up transformed by shows like “Howdy Doody,” “The Mickey Mouse Club” and, later, “I Love Lucy.”

“I wanted to jump into my TV and live in that world,” he says.

Part of the delight of the first half of Wolf’s film is watching the wide range of inspirations — the circus culture of Sarasota, Florida, where his family moved to; Andy Warhol; performance art — coalesce into a singular creation like Pee-wee. That name, he says, came from a tiny harmonica that said “Pee-wee” on it, and a kid named Herman he knew growing up.

“It was a whole bunch of things that had never really connected connecting,” says Reubens.

Wolf carefully traces the birth of Reubens’ alter-ego through the Groundlings in Los Angeles, onstage at the Roxy and then out into the world, on “The Gong Show,” on Letterman, in the 1985 Tim Burton- directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and, ultimately, on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

“I felt in a way I was bringing the character out into the wild,” he recalls. “I just stayed in character all day.”

For the sake of his career, Reubens stayed closeted as a gay man. He grew intensely private and seldom appeared in public not in character. Reubens also jettisoned some of his close collaborators, like Phil Hartman, as his fame grew.

There’s tragedy in Reubens’ increasing isolation.

When Reubens was arrested in 1991 and charged with indecent exposure, Reubens’ carefully guarded persona came crashing down. The scandal was worse because people knew only Pee-wee and not Reubens. There was also injustice in the whole affair, particularly the 2002 arrest that followed on charges of child pornography that were later dropped. In both cases, homophobia played a role.

When Reubens does get around to talking about it, he’s most resistant to painting himself as a victim, or offering any, as he says, “tears of a clown.”

The day before he died, Reubens called Wolf to say one last thing: “I wanted to let people know who I really was and see how painful it was to be labeled as something I wasn’t.”

MPA rating: Unrated

Running time: 3:25

How to watch: HBO, streaming on HBO Max