Review: Rocketman

With the echoes of Bohemian Rhapsody still bouncing off cinema walls, does the world really need another tale of the rise and fall (and rise) of a 70s glam rocker? Rocketman aims squarely for the same toe-tapping retro audience that made that Freddie Mercury biopic such a smash, but - suburban origins aside, and even there there's big differences - Elton John is a markedly different figure, and his music makes for a very different story.

Directed by Dexter Fletcher (who handled the last few weeks on Bohemian Rhapsody when Bryan Singer was let go) from a story by John himself, this leans harder on the performance side of things, in large part because the whole point of this film is that "Elton John" is a performance. The performer formerly known as Reginald Dwight (Taron Egerton) had a grim home life thanks to a disinterested mum (Bryce Dallas Howard) and emotionally constipated dad (Steven Mackintosh), but his kindly gran (Gemma Jones) nurtured his musical talents and then...

Okay, John's early musical struggles aren't really lingered on once he (briefly) leaves home, and there doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of them in the first place. Once he'd teamed up with lyricist Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) his stardom was basically assured, and a string of performances in LA soon made him a global sensation. With manager and lover John Reid (Richard Madden) by his side, John was suddenly at the top of the world - but could money, drugs and meaningless sex fill the void in his heart?

A more experienced - or just more personally removed - scriptwriting team probably would have made more out of John's early rise, as this suffers from an extremely drawn out second act where John flails about trying to lose himself in the usual rock'n roll distractions (he and Reid have one sex scene, but otherwise the gay sex and disco orgies are largely only suggested). Fortunately John has an extremely strong back catalogue, and his story-based style of song-writing lends itself to illustrating moments in his life; treated as a jukebox musical, this delivers all the hits and then some, and Egerton throws himself fully into the large-than-life performance scenes.

Plot-wise, this is the story of a man trying to find the love he was denied in his childhood, and it's entertainingly harsh towards those who weren't up to scratch; while his parents and Reid aren't completely one-dimensional, this is the story of how John grew beyond them and there's not a lot of backwards-looking forgiveness on offer here.

So it's a little frustrating that there's no real moment of revelation either. It's obvious that the arc is that Dwight felt unlovable so turned himself into a character he thought would be loved - the brash and flamboyant Elton John - only to eventually figure out the usual stuff about nobody loving you until you love yourself and so on. But here John simply decides to clean up his act and reunite with the one person who never did him wrong (Bernie), he sings "I'm Still Standing" and that's pretty much it - even meeting his real-life husband of over twenty years happens during the end credits coda.

And yet despite rushing through what should be the big emotional payoff (whatever Bohemian Rhapsody's many flaws, it knew it had to finish big), Rocketman remains firmly entertaining. It's almost as if the finished film is trying to get across the opposite message to the script: so long as you give people a good time (and don't let the booze and drugs get in the way of your performing), they'll love you no matter what.  When your costumes are that flamboyant, people can't see the person inside.

- Anthony Morris