If music biopics all use pretty much the same template—the rise, the tumult, the redemption (or death)—director Dexter Fletcher puts some sparkle on it with his Rocketman. Which is fitting, given that the film concerns Elton John, the flamboyant showman whose catalog of songs contains a staggering number of inescapable hits. These days he’s mostly known as a bespectacled elder statesman of showbiz, a party host and philanthropist seemingly comfortable in his legacy. But in his true heyday, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, he was a vibrant and daring flash of something new, a molten icon-in-the-making, thrilling in all his arch camp underscored by a frantic darkness. In Rocketman’s best stretches, Fletcher captures that bracing energy, the thunder and soar of a new star suddenly bright in the firmament.
It helps immensely that he treats the film like an actual musical, rather than a parade of recording sessions and on-stage performances. John’s music occurs naturally and fantastically in Rocketman, surging out of moments of emotion in clever and sometimes poignant ways. Working with Lee Hall’s dutiful script, Fletcher traces John—née Reggie Dwight—as he leaves his relatively loveless childhood home in Penner and pursues his musical ambitions, aided all the while by lyricist Bernie Taupin. John’s career arc is yoked to his struggles with self, coming to terms with his sexuality as he yearns for the love and comfort denied him by his parents. Songs intermingle with and highlight all this pathos, putting a personal stamp on music that is so known now it’s become universal.
Only, Taupin was the one writing the lyrics, wasn’t he? So it’s not always easy to see John in those songs, try as Rocketman does to bind John’s narrative to them. Luckily for Fletcher, there’s adept actor Taron Egerton to rely on to make those connections. Egerton tears into the material with an intensity that elevates Rocketman’s standard-issue tortured-artist drama. It ought to elevate Egerton’s profile, too, bringing him from smirking action star (in films like Kingsman and Robin Hood) to something richer, more expansive. It’s a terrific performance, nuanced and emotionally intelligent while still loose, carried with verve and agility. He’s also singing, at a slightly thinner timbre than the real John, but nonetheless convincing in all its pained and ecstatic flair. It’s no wonder Egerton was seen crying as the film was about to premiere here at Cannes on Thursday night: he has poured the fullness of his talent into the job, and it’s yielded at times dazzling results.
If only the film beyond him could match that wonder. It does, in fits and starts, come close, particularly in scenes between John and his former romantic partner and manager John Reid, played with menacing allure by Richard Madden. Egerton and Madden share a palpable, almost hungry chemistry, and when they’re together on screen, Rocketman has the complicated texture of tangible life. Even when the relationship sours, there’s an invigorating charge passing between them. I wish that we got more of that dynamic, but by Reid’s arrival, Rocketman has expended a lot of time on setup, feeling we need to have seen John as a little boy in order to understand him as a brilliant and needy young man. I’m not entirely sure that we do, but, again, Fletcher is following a formula. And so, we must be served the humble beginnings.
Watching Rocketman, particularly the romantic interludes and the sequences when song takes over from story, you get a glimpse of a more innovative and impressionistic biopic that could have been. It would also be decidedly less commercial. It’s a shame that Rocketman only uses its heat sparingly, otherwise staying on the safe path tread most recently by the Oscar-winning box-office smash Bohemian Rhapsody. (Fletcher stepped in to finish that film after Fox fired Bryan Singer, its credited director.) That’s understandable, I suppose, but I think Rocketman’s standard tale of addiction and the beginnings of recovery could have been something new and more. That DNA is in there, waiting to be given more than light.
I’d also like to get to know the people surrounding John a little better, particularly Taupin. He’s played with warmth and decency by a majestically bewigged Jamie Bell (everyone in Rocketman is on a real hair journey), who makes Taupin a wise and patient collaborator always willing to step back so John can shine, alone. I’d have to imagine the real partnership was—is?—more complicated than that. What was Taupin feeling when he wrote all that pop poetry, those tricky lyrics that are both edgy and almost folksy? Rocketman doesn’t tell us much of anything on that front. This is the Elton John show, after all, complete with a coda full of life updates and photos.
Rocketman is awfully careful in that way, serving the audience a tune we can hum because we already know it by heart. It’s a satisfying and even rousing film at times, but it doesn’t provide much enlightenment. While all of the costuming (meticulously re-created by Julian Day) is deliciously silly and garish, we never really learn why John is wearing it. Or, more important, how he is. The mechanics of John’s shift from shyness to splendor isn’t articulated in Rocketman. Because, I guess, all that psychological explication would get in the way of the easy celebration. And all Rocketman really wants to do is play us the hits. At least Egerton gives us a good show.
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