Rocketman Movie Review

Rocketman (2019)

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Written by: Lee Hall
Directed by: Dexter Fletcher
Starring: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard, Tate Donovan
Rated: R
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Plot
A musical fantasy about the fantastical human story of Elton John's breakthrough years.

Verdict
This is less a rigid fact based retelling and more of a musical that catches the broad beats of the story. It's feeling over facts, but it is mostly accurate. It is definitely a musical and while the songs aren't chronological, their order imparts a lot of meaning. It's a dynamic setup that makes it more exciting than a straight retelling. Most important, the movie is entertaining.
Watch it.

Review
Before I started watching this I thought it was a standard biopic. It's definitely not, and I'm glad it's more musical fantasy. This is more interesting than a standard biopic ever could have been. While it doesn't portray things exactly as they happened, Elton John could hear and reproduce songs on the piano and he did go to the academy of art. He did not pick his last name based on John Lennon. All movies tweak facts for the sake of the story.

I like Elton John's music, but I only know what I've heard on the radio. I did enjoy all the music in this movie.

Taron Egerton and Jamie Bell play Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

A big theme of this movie is love. Elton's parents weren't encouraging or loving. They were at times downright mean, and it's understandable that he carried that baggage. No matter how well he performed, how famous he became, or how much money he generated they were uninterested in him. Teenage Elton sings about how he desires love, and that quickly makes the point.
Later in the movie Elton, now famous worldwide, goes back to his dad hoping for some kind of encouragement and gets nothing. It's all the more painful when Elton sees his dad hug the new family. That lack of love was a hole Elton tried to fill through drugs, alcohol, sex, and shopping. The movie is framed as Elton at an addiction meeting and the movie notes at the end Elton has been sober for nearly thirty years.

As assumed, there is a lot of Elton John music. The movie doesn't insert it chronologically, but implies certain events were the inspiration for the song. With Bernie Taupin having written most of the songs, Elton John wasn't personally inspired, but the song placement fits very well and makes the movie much more personal than it could have been.

This doesn't get bogged down in details, revealing just enough to get to the next scene and create an overall portrait of Elton.

How do you stand out with so many recent movies about musicians? This is how. The concept fits the subject as Elton John is a showman. It's easy to compare this to Bohemian Rhapsody if you're just looking at the covers, but they're very different movies. Bohemian Rhapsody was a collection of songs linked by boring scenes that tried to follow the historical outline, Rocketman manages to intertwine story and song into something fun and informative. You get a sense of the artist even if you don't know every little fact.