Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Documentary Showing How the Media Mogul Did Good All By Himself

There’s been no shortage of high-profile celeb biodocs in 2023, the latest being Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), from directors Gelila Bekele and Armani Ortiz. The easy joke here is, why would Perry agree to be the subject of a documentary that will likely be more technically and narratively coherent than anything he’s ever directed himself? But admittedly, that’s a cheap shot, and the doc exists to emphasize the inspiring elements of Perry’s story: He’s a wholly self-made multi-hyphenate media mogul who grassrooted his way from stage to big screen to small screen and is now a billionaire who owns all his intellectual property and a sprawling Atlanta production studio, all built upon the shoulders of Madea, the beloved reefer-smokin’, cussin’, takin’-no-guff elder matriarch character he plays in fatsuit drag. This isn’t quite like the many pseudo-confessional vanity docs we’ve seen lately, profiling the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Pamela Anderson and others – notably, Perry isn’t a producer of Maxine’s Baby – so it doesn’t ring of self-aggrandizement. But just regular aggrandizement? Yeah. It’s a bit guilty of that, but that doesn’t necessarily detract from Perry’s fascinating saga.

MAXINE’S BABY: THE TYLER PERRY STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Lucky Johnson drives us around New Orleans, showing us the neighborhood and house where his cousin Tyler Perry grew up. He wasn’t Tyler then; he was Emmitt Jr. Johnson even slips up a couple times, calling him “Junior,” a tag that Perry discarded as soon as he could. He didn’t like being named after his father, for reasons that quickly become obvious: Emmitt Sr. was a hard drinker who physically abused young Perry until he had welts rising on his back, until he crawled into a cubbyhole beneath the house to hide, until he cut his own wrists. Thank god for his mother, Maxine, who loved him and nurtured him and raised him in the church, where he found some solace. Perry would study in the seminary, but his pastor says delivering solemn sermons wasn’t the young Perry’s strength. But that didn’t put a dent in his faith, which became a constant in all stages of his life. 

Now, Perry’s name adorns the digital sign at the entrance to a massive Atlanta property housing a dozen soundstages; the acreage used to be a Confederate military base, so feel free to relish that righteous symbolism. The camera tails Perry, wearing a crisp white tuxedo, as he readies for his introduction at the opening gala celebrating Tyler Perry Studios. A voice from behind the camera calls him “sir,” and asks what the young Tyler Perry might think if he could see himself basking in all this success. The questioner gets a testy reply: “I’m not going there.” But the documentary goes there, because it has to, so it leans on old TV interviews with Piers Morgan and Oprah Winfrey and the like to detail what he doesn’t want to get into now. We also learn how Perry’s Aunt Jerry, Johnson’s mother, once threatened Emmitt Sr. with a gun after she saw the welts on her nephew’s skin, and she admits that isn’t her proudest moment. Is that part of Madea’s origin story? It has to be. 

Perry shares how, in the midst of being abused, he’d detach his mind from his body, and envision happier places, places where he told stories. Oprah was an inspiration, and seeing an episode of her talk show inspired him to write in journals, which became his first stage production, I Know I’ve Been Changed. It took years for that play to draw an audience; few people showed up for early Atlanta productions, but eventually, a last-ditch run in Chicago packed theaters. Subsequent stage productions saw him develop Madea into a crowd-pleasing comedy icon drawing a hardcore Black fanbase on tours of the South/Midwest “Chitlin’ Circuit,” famously playing 300 nights per year between 1998 and 2004. By then, his ambition stretched toward cinema, where Madea became an anchor for a series of films that surprised those not in the loop with significant box-office success in the mid-2000s – as if it was a major revelation in Hollywood that Black people like to go to the movies too. 

With crossover fame came critics who didn’t care for Perry’s use of Black stereotypes for comedic purposes. Although Maxine’s Baby gives some space to academics who scrutinized Perry’s work – cue a clip of Spike Lee calling Perry’s style of comedy “buffoonery” – it counters with an onslaught of praise from studio execs, marketing wonks, publicists and agents who explain how he broke all the rules, delivered entertainment to an underserved audience and maintained creative control of his projects. These voices, unsurprisingly, lean heavily on the big-numbers-equal-success side of the populism/artistry divide. The doc then asserts, throughout Perry’s insanely prolific, insanely profitable career, that his mother was his inspiration, the guiding, grounding force of his life; when she passed in 2009, he felt lost, hence the title of this movie.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sly, Arnold, Val, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie and Pamela, A Love Story all peer into celebs’ lives – with a fair amount of insight and aggrandizement.

Performance Worth Watching: Lucky Johnson and Aunt Jerry’s unvarnished, candid commentary is necessary to counterbalance all the praise from entertainment-biz talking heads.

Memorable Dialogue: Perry fluffs his own feathers a bit: “You work your ass off when you’re the owner. And there is nobody, I mean nobody, who’d outwork me. Nobody could outwork me. James Brown would’ve bowed down.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Musing on Perry’s biography prompts a game of What If: Without the context of their being made by a pioneering Black creator who achieved the poverty-to-megawealth American dream, would House of Payne and the Madeas be anything more than profitable, creatively middling, disposable entertainment? That’s a long way of saying that the context in which Perry’s fictional stories were created is more compelling than the stories themselves. He writes and directs and produces with such velocity and intensity – he says he experiences bursts of productivity where he can write 20 scripts in two weeks – that the process outshines the final products, which tend to be broad and simplistic, and lack polish and attention to detail. This isn’t yet another opportunity for a critic to pile on Perry (he’s shown significant artistic ambition on occasion, e.g., the films For Colored Girls and The Jazzman’s Blues), but to note how Maxine’s Baby doesn’t include much in the way of clips from his movies and TV shows, possibly because their shoddy content might undermine Ortiz and Bekele’s thesis statement.

And while the doc illustrates how Perry draws on the life experience, the Black experience, that many find truthful and relatable, there’s relatively sparse evidence that he has much to say in his work beyond the nuggets of wisdom Madea shares in between indulgences of gross caricature (which make many people laugh for many reasons, comedy, and the value of escapist entertainment, being as subjective as ever). That leaves us to the robust context of Perry’s accomplishments: His life story is undoubtedly inspiring, and to have it all collected in the thoughtful and concise manner of Maxine’s Baby makes for an engaging watch. He’s a Black man who became a powerful voice for many in his community. He went from watching Oprah on TV to being her peer –  she gives extensive interviews here, pointedly sharing how he “turned his pain into some real power.” 

On that note, the film turns up another question: Where might he be without that pain? We can only guess, because although we get some glimpses into his emotional life via archival interviews, he doesn’t articulate any further for Ortiz and Bekele. Perhaps it’s a missed opportunity for him to be open and vulnerable for people who need to hear that they’re not alone in their suffering (notably, there’s only a vague reference to Perry’s being sexually abused as a child), perhaps he’s guarded for the sake of privacy and feels he’s addressed the topic enough publicly – neither is necessarily wrong. The doc does delve further into the heartbreaking topic of Emmitt Sr., who’s still alive and supported by Perry, who insists his father deserves some praise for instilling in him the work ethic that fueled the Tyler Perry empire.

Less convincing is his sniping at the traditional Hollywood system as wasteful and inefficient, since his work so often shows the seams of his overly expedient process; why he insists on working this way is a question never asked, so one assumes it’s because there’s truckloads of money to be made. The Tyler Perry saga is rife with such cognitive dissonance: He’s far, far from a product of privilege, and his bootstrapped success helped elevate a serially marginalized and underrepresented community, but we can’t overlook how his slapdash entertainment products made him incredibly rich and powerful. The only solid conclusion we can come to is, the man contains multitudes. 

Our Call: If Tyler Perry’s story was any less complex, it might not be worth an entertaining documentary like Maxine’s Baby. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.