One of the pivotal turns in Paul Reubens’s life happened years before Pee-wee Herman, years before the “Playhouse,” years before the arrests. It was the mid-seventies, and Reubens was in his early twenties, a bohemian art freak just out of CalArts, with long, greasy hair and a patchy beard. He could have fit right in among John Waters’s ensemble of weirdos—in fact, he looked not unlike the guy who has sex with a live chicken in “Pink Flamingos.” At art school, he’d been the wildest of a wild bunch, acting in a student film in Cher-inspired mermaid drag and smooching his classmates at a Valentine’s Day kissing booth. He had plans to join the Angels of Light, an offshoot of the radical-queer troupe the Cockettes, and he started driving cross-country from his parents’ house, in Sarasota, Florida, to San Francisco. “I was on a path to become an underground performer,” Reubens recalls in “Pee-wee as Himself,” a revelatory two-part HBO documentary débuting Friday.

He never made it to San Francisco. In Los Angeles, he went to a party and spotted a gorgeous young Black man, a painter named Guy, and was instantly infatuated. They became a couple and moved in together in Echo Park. Guy had a habit of tasting something and saying, “Mmm, chocolaty!” or “Mmm, buttery!”—a bit that Reubens later adopted as a Pee-wee-ism. Reubens immersed himself in the relationship, to the point that he lost track of his own personality and ambition, both of which were enormous. “I just made a conscious decision and went, I’m not doing this again,” he told Matt Wolf, who directed the documentary. “I not only wasn’t going to be openly gay but I wasn’t going to be in a relationship. I was going to advance my career, because I could control that.” He went back into the closet and stayed there, more or less, until his death, in 2023.

What if Reubens hadn’t fallen in love? What if he’d made it to San Francisco? His obituary might have read like that of Rumi Missabu, the avant-garde drag exhibitionist from the Cockettes, known for campy, experimental films such as “Elevator Girls in Bondage.” He might have found his countercultural tribe in the Castro, and he might well have become a casualty of the AIDS epidemic (as Guy did, after he and Reubens broke up). Instead, he channelled his anarchic instincts into a package that Hollywood would reward. He joined the L.A. comedy group the Groundlings, where one of his characters was Pee-wee Herman, a clean-cut man-child with a red bow tie, a too-tight suit, and the combustible energy of a hyperactive little boy. After a failed audition for “Saturday Night Live” (when he saw Gilbert Gottfried there, he knew there wasn’t room for the both of them), he staged “The Pee-wee Herman Show” as a late-night showcase at the Groundlings Theatre. The character became a sensation, moving to the Roxy, then to HBO, then to the big screen (“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” directed by Tim Burton), then to Saturday-morning television, where his act—originally a cheeky sendup of fifties children’s TV shows like “Howdy Doody”—became an actual children’s show, albeit a gleefully strange and subversive one. As Reubens tells Wolf, “I was being a performance artist in mainstream pop culture.”

Pee-wee was performance art, largely because Reubens had made another pivotal decision: to disappear Paul Reubens from public life and present Pee-wee as a real person. “I decided I was no longer pursuing the Paul Reubens career,” he told Wolf. “I was pursuing the Pee-wee Herman career.” Early on, he saw an ad for contestants on “The Dating Game” and joined as Pee-wee (as Bachelor No. 3, he actually won). Pee-wee started appearing on Lee Leonard’s CNN talk show and, eventually, became a fixture on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where the host’s deadpan perfectly matched Pee-wee’s lunacy.

But there was a price to splitting himself in two. One day, as the Roxy show was getting big, Reubens stood across the street and gazed at Pee-wee’s name on the marquee, revelling in his dreams of stardom coming true—and then had an anxiety attack. “I realized that there is only so much that you can hide behind an alter ego,” he told Wolf. By the time “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” premièred, in 1985—making Reubens simultaneously famous and anonymous—he started feeling jealousy toward the character he’d unleashed. Few knew that the Paul Reubens credited as a co-writer was the man behind Pee-wee. (Three years later, Pee-wee—not Paul—got a star on the Walk of Fame, a fact that seemed to vex him.) But, by that point, Reubens says, “the ink had dried on my pact with the Devil.”

The reference is to Faust, but Reubens’s fraught relationship with his alter ego reminded me of another myth: that of the creator who loses control of his creation. The rabbi and his golem, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the scientist and his cyborg. Often, these creations embody the mischievous id we otherwise suppress, making them all the more untamable. This is true of puppets, as well; think of the dignified Edgar Bergen and his impish dummy, Charlie McCarthy, or of the soft-spoken Jim Henson and his antic Muppets. It’s no coincidence that “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was inhabited by puppets (Chairry, Pterri, Globey) who lived as equals alongside their human host. Pee-wee was a kind of flesh-and-blood puppet, manipulated by Reubens as if by invisible strings.

A related trope is the doppelgänger, dating back at least to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” As my colleagues observed recently on the Critics at Large podcast, doppelgängers seem to be omnipresent in pop culture these days, from the rebellious “innies” of “Severance” to Demi Moore’s impudent young replacement in “The Substance.” In Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”—now on Broadway, in a brilliant stage adaptation starring Sarah Snook—the callow title character retains his youth and beauty while the ugliness of his misdeeds plays out on a magical portrait hidden in his attic. Doppelgängers personify what we fear or wish for in ourselves, and Pee-wee did both: he was outrageous, he was impulsive, he was queer in multiple senses, and, most important, he was famous.

When I interviewed Reubens for The Talk of the Town a decade and a half ago, as he was planning Pee-wee’s comeback, I was struck by how sedate he was, how unlike his manic doppelgänger. We met at a nearly empty diner off Hollywood Boulevard, and he was wearing a calculator watch. “Anywhere I went, people would call me Pee-wee,” he said, in a near-whisper. “And I’d go out of my way to add to that, because I thought that conceptually it worked better if people weren’t going, ‘That’s an actor doing that.’ ”

After “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” ended its five-season run, Reubens took a break at his parents’ house, in Florida. It was there, in 1991, that he was arrested for indecent exposure at an adult-movie theatre. (In fairness, how else are you supposed to kill time visiting your parents in Sarasota?) Reubens pleaded no contest, to avoid the publicity of a trial, but the damage was done. The mug shot—with his hair long and stringy, like the art-school punk he’d once been—was splashed across the tabloids. It was especially jarring since the public had not yet met Paul Reubens. “I kept who I was a secret for a very long time, and that served me very well, as I wanted it to,” Reubens tells Wolf. “And then it didn’t. It really backfired when I got arrested and people had never seen a photo of me other than Pee-wee Herman—and then, all of a sudden, I had a Charlie Manson mug shot. I lost control of my anonymity, and it was devastating.”

“Control” is the operative word, one that comes up again and again in “Pee-wee as Himself.” Reubens was obsessively controlling of his movies and TV shows, down to the smallest stop-motion details in the “Playhouse” opening theme. This could rankle his collaborators. “Paul had conflicts with most everybody he worked with,” one artist who worked on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” told Wolf. “That was just his nature. He was such a perfectionist and so driven to make something that matters.” Reubens’s need for control manifests in the documentary itself, which is punctuated with meta moments of pushback against the director. “Turns out that you’re not really supposed to direct your own documentary,” Reubens says at one point, with a passive-aggressive playfulness.