Rocketman

Synopsis: The story of how suburban London boy Reginald Dwight became Elton John, international rock music superstar.

You don’t have to be a fan of Elton John’s music (although as there’s lots of it you shouldn’t actively dislike it) to enjoy Rocketman, Dexter Fletcher’s lively account of how a shy, pudgy lad from Middlesex became a rock icon during the glam-loving 1970s.

Taking what feels like a broad-brush approach to Reggie Dwight’s life, Fletcher who took over directorial duties on the recently departed Bohemian Rhapsody delivers another account of a shy lad from Middlesex becoming a rock and gay icon. The core narrative elements are pretty much the same but Fletcher adopts a bolder, more inventive way of telling his story. The result is a winning film full of John and his partner Bernie Taupin’s chart-topping songs and a loving recreation of his outrageous stage costumery. Taron Egerton isn’t as forceful a screen presence as Rami Malik but then few people would match Freddie Mercury for star-power.

Unlike the Queen film Rocketman is a musical, complete with large ensemble production numbers and characters breaking into song, and often dance, as the story unfolds (no doubt it will get a stage incarnation). It opens with a kind of confessional AA meeting with John in a suitably outlandish stage outfit scrolling back in time to tell the story of his life. We are taken back to jos childhood in suburban London with his loving Nan (Gemma Jones), a flirty mother (Bryce Dallas Howard) and emotionally-frozen father (Steven Mackintosh) who eventually walked out on them; then as the 1960s pop revolution took over his preternatural gift for music leading him to gigs backing American soul performers and eventually to Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), phenomenal chart success (cue montage) and a lavish lifestyle to match, all translating into loads of drugs and sex, self-loathing and attempted suicide and eventually to rehab, thus neatly closing the narrative loop but now with John, his demons exorcised, soberly bereft of his stage persona .

The film has been praised in comparison to Bohemian Rhapsody for being more candid about John’s drug and sex addiction but frankly there’s nothing gained by fairly tame scenes of him rolling in the hay with his sometime manager John Reid (Richard Madden) or hoovering up cocaine and at 121 minutes the film could well have been shortened. Indeed there is little to be gained in regarding the film as a biopic and not a fantasy like Judy Taymor’s Fab Four re-imagining, Across The Universe (2007).

Egerton’s performance doesn’t need to be assessed according to his likeness to John, which isn’t more than passing (he seems shorter and has an odd stumpy gait). It works on its own terms much like that of John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). That he does all his own singing adds to its persuasiveness particularly in quiet numbers like ‘Your Song’. Indeed the end titles which tell us rather cloyingly where the real Elton John is at today feels like a forced attempt to ground the essentially mythic (some would say ‘formulaic’) tale in reality (although oddly it makes no mention of former manager Reid who is made out in the film to be an arch villain).

There are no moments in Rocketman that really hold you as does Cameron Crowe’s staging of “Tiny Dancer’ in Almost Famous (2000) but as packaged entertainment it works well enough.

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