Highly Recommended
It’s a little bit funny. It sells you magic. It’s got its heart in the right place. Dexter Fletcher’s gift is this film, and this one’s for you.
While music biopics are a dime a dozen, including ones that don’t even have the rights to the original music, some lives feel like they are written for the big screen. Coinciding with his retirement from live touring, the history of Elton John’s life and career is just as over-the-top as his stagecraft.
Complete with a flamboyant entrance in a sparkly devil costume, Lee Hall’s screenplay uses a rehab session as a framing device. The recovering Elton (Taron Egerton) reflects on his earliest memories with music, his relationship with his mother (Bryce Dallas Howard), his songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), his affair with John Reid (Richard Madden), and all the hits, sex, and drugs along the way.
ROCKETMAN isn’t concerned with historical fidelity as it is with catching the spirit of its subject’s music. Which isn’t to say that it’s inaccurate, it’s just written and performed as high fantasy. Within moments of opening, we are transported to a post-War London via a straight-up musical theatre rendition of “The Bitch Is Back.”
The film carries on in this fashion, leaping through the years by using the songs as narrative shortcuts. It’s the same method that worked in the stage production of Jersey Boys, but with all the flair of a modern music video. “Your Song” serves as a revelatory moment to showcase the partnership of Taupin and John, while both the performer and crowd literally float off the ground as his performance of “Crocodile Rock” at LA’s Troubadour lifts him out of obscurity.
While it serves nobody to directly compare biopics, it’s impossible to not reference Bohemian Rhapsody. After all, Fletcher was the director who stepped in to replace Bryan Singer and at least some of that film’s success belongs to him. Both films feature famously gay performers who were closeted at the peaks of their career, and like Freddie Mercury, a character of a gay manager/hanger-on is used as a mephistopheles figure that enables a life of excess. Yet the crucial difference is that John now fully owns his past debauchery, and his homosexuality is never portrayed as a moral failing (as it was with Mercury).
Aiding this greatly is the revelatory Egerton in the lead role. If Kingsman: The Secret Service was his breakthrough role, then ROCKETMAN is surely his star-making performance. Along with providing some pretty faithful vocals while giving us his own take on the hits, slowly physically transforming into a Vegas-worthy lookalike.
ROCKETMAN manages to transcend the pitfalls of the jukebox musical by weaving in the highs and lows of John’s life with meticulously crafted versions of his most famous hits. As it ends with a recreation of Russell Mulcahy’s “I’m Still Standing” video, the seamless blend of original and recreation becomes all the more impressive.
2019 | US | DIRECTOR: Dexter Fletcher | WRITERS: Lee Hall | CAST: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard | DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 121 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 30 May 2018 (AUS)
