Rocketman (2019)
Directed by Dexter Fletcher
The story of Elton John's life, from his years as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music through his influential and enduring musical partnership with Bernie Taupin.
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Feeling more akin to Moulin Rouge! than Walk the Line , Rocketman is a refreshingly confident retelling of the key moment’s in Elton John’s life.
John’s songs are notoriously unambiguous in their topics—his ballad “Your Song” famously proved a good vehicle for Ewan McGregor’s character’s romantic declaration to Nicole Kidman’s character in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! —and their lyrics provide him with a way for his onscreen avatar to express himself quite literally.
Loosely, think of a meeting between Moulin Rouge! and Hairspray , in the way this movie is so proudly built on the house of hits, and relishes the opportunity to give them high stakes through make-believe sound stages and everyday conversations sung entirely in earnest.
We’ve seen this level of visual opulence in musicals before (films such as “Across the Universe” and “Moulin Rouge!” did so with much greater confidence and delivery) and every year we see some sort of narrative that follows this path, but Fletcher and screenwriter Lee Hall lean into Elton’s open vulnerability.
All of those moments, though, are only the notes behind the songs which Rocketman brings to screen, because the film is a mad audiovisual treat that made me think of Moulin Rouge! .
Fletcher is channeling All That Jazz and Absolute Beginners but with a Hairspray meets Mamma Mia! high-gloss glittery shimmer, the grit and angst of the tortured artist juxtaposed against a Technicolor milieu that’s been art directed and costumed within an inch of its rockabilly heart.
Russell, who died eight years ago, would have been an ideal director for Rocketman , a musical about John that combines the jukebox format, where existing hits are strung together to tell a story, with the biopic, which asks that the story in question be at least broadly factual – a Bohemian Rhapsody as opposed to a Mamma Mia! Dexter Fletcher, who directed Rocketman and some of Bohemian Rhapsody (he stepped in when the original film-maker was fired) is a former actor whose credits include Ken Russell’s Gothic , so he’s no stranger to the far-out way of doing things.
Rocketman is also, of course, a close relation to Mamma Mia! and all those repertoire-rifling jukebox musicals that now rule the world’s theater stages.
Any major studio that gets its hands on the rights to a rock star’s music and desires to retrofit it into a movie for the fans to drive down memory lane has two options: A biopic that episodically lines up snippets of the artist’s life, like last year’s bafflingly popular Bohemian Rhapsody, or a jukebox musical that integrates the beloved hits into an original story like the gaudy Mamma Mia! or the sublime Across the Universe.
And yet, when you consider all the wonderful ways that Elton John’s music has elevated movies over the years — from his original soundtracks for “Friends” and “The Lion King” to the way Cameron Crowe repurposed “Tiny Dancer” in “Almost Famous” — Fletcher’s inventive numbers face stiff competition.
(This theory would also make sense for anyone who’s repeatedly watched the “Tiny Dancer” singalong tour bus scene in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous .)
Elton John’s music has graced cinemas before: you might remember it from key scenes in Almost Famous (‘Tiny Dancer’), Moulin Rouge (‘Your Song’); 27 Dresses (‘Bennie and the Jets’), or the 2011 animated film Gnomeo and Juliet .
“Tiny Dancer” actually manages to escape Almost Famous for a minute, by embodying John’s inner monologue at a party.
Almost Famous is unforgettable after a ‘Tiny Dancer’ sing-along.
Mostly more snippets than full songs, the eclectic numbers include a magnificent Pleasantville -esque take on The Bitch is Back , I Want Love as a dinner table lament, reclaiming Tiny Dancer from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous by staging it as the surveying of party scene, turning Honky Cat into the aspirations-achieved showstopper and using a Greek chorus of restaurant diners to add extra resonance to Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word .
The result might remind one of the (perhaps apocryphal) remark that Heath Ledger is supposed to have made when he lost the Best Actor Oscar (for “Brokeback Mountain”) to Philip Seymour Hoffman (for “Capote”)—“I thought it was for the best acting, not the most acting.”
Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) also depicted gay sex but was made by smaller studio off-shoots with limited cinema releases.
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Paramount seems to be relying on a narrow definition of “major studio” (was United Artists not a major studio when it made Cruising back in 1980?) to position itself as a trailblazer in the event that Rocketman , a major summer bet for the company, should underperform at the box office; never mind that the movie is an unabashed musical and decidedly less pandering than, say, Bohemian Rhapsody (the inevitable comparisons to which I will get to shortly).
In an effort to squeeze every last dollar out of Middle America, Bohemian Rhapsody often tried to downplay Freddie’s fondness for the lads, with risible scenes that played like G-rated outtakes from William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 dud Cruising .
We saw this in action with 2015’s Straight Outta Compton , an entertaining film that nonetheless heavily sanitised the historical details of the surviving members of N.W.A. Then again, even when the subject is deceased, as in the case of 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody , the tendency to omit the more complicated details persists; in the case of that film Freddie Mercury’s drug use and prolific sexual adventures.
Still a star on the rise from his work in the “Kingsman” series and “Eddie the Eagle,” this is a huge step up in profile and degree of difficulty for the 29-year-old actor, and he’s happily up to the task, with a strong singing voice that evokes Elton without worrying too much about being a perfect facsimile.
Director Dexter Fletcher (Sunshine on Leith, Eddie the Eagle) wins points for some well-choreographed musical numbers that give Rocketman the feel of an expensive Broadway show.
Director Dexter Fletcher ( Eddie the Eagle and co-director of Bohemian Rhapsody ) along with screenwriter Lee Hall ( Billy Elliot ) took a risk when they decided to not only show John singing in studios, clubs or concert halls.
Though director Dexter Fletcher has made a fistful of good films – Wild Bill ; the musical Sunshine on Leith ; and the aspirational sports dramedy Eddie the Eagle (with Taron Egerton and Hugh Jackman) – he is best-known as the ‘saviour’ director of Bohemian Rhapsody who stepped in and completed the film (30% of it, at Fletcher’s estimate) after director Bryan Singer was fired over allegations of sexual misconduct.
Director Dexter Fletcher, who helmed "Eddie the Eagle" starring Egerton, brilliantly weaves the colorful song renditions in and out of Lee Hall's moving screenplay, making the iconic singer's life seem almost surrealistic.
Director Dexter Fletcher, who also finished up “Bohemian Rhapsody” after the original director was fired, wisely uses the more flamboyant elements of the story as a backdrop and keeps the camera focus on Taron Egerton (the “Kingsman” movies and “Eddie the Eagle,” also directed by Fletcher).
Egerton is “Captain Fantastic” as Elton John.