‘Rocketman’ an off-key Elton John biopic
Rocketman Rated: R for language throughout, some drug use and sexual content. Running time: 121 minutes. 6⏩⁄2 out of 4
It’s hard to say who will be more disappointed by “Rocketman,” people who know a lot about Elton John or people who know nothing.
If you know a lot, you will recognize everything that’s inaccurate here — the order of events, the sequencing of the releases and major shows. But if you know nothing, you will come away with absolutely no idea as to why this guy was once the biggest star in the world. Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.
Elton John is so often thought of as a showman and a songwriter that his vocals get short shrift. That’s the biggest mistake (of many) made here. In the title role, Taron Egerton does his own singing, and instead of the crystalline voice and wide vocal range of EJ’s heyday, we get a mannered imitation that doesn’t advance past weak karaoke. Egerton sounds vaguely like Elton in his
70s, and nothing like Elton in the 1970s, which is when the film mostly takes place.
That’s bad, and it gets worse.
The attempt was to do something different. Unlike Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, Elton John never had a dead brother, so screenwriter Lee Hall throws out the usual biopic formula and creates a kind of fantasia. Elton goes to a
12-step meeting and starts telling stories from his childhood; whereupon we drop into a fantasy sequence, on a street in Britain in the 1950s, as a very young Elton bursts into a rendition of “The Bitch is Back.”
So, that’s the convention, a series of flashbacks, in which Elton John’s songbook is used to illustrate moments from his life. That could have been interesting, though a bit of a challenge, in that Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin (aside from one album) are two of the least autobiographical songwriters of the past 50 years. All the same, the potential was there for something like “Pennies from Heaven,” except with Elton John songs.
But for all the movie’s attempt to be different, it ends up running aground from yet another showbiz cliché — the one about addiction and recovery. Consider how ridiculous this is: Here we have this singular fellow, with a career and a talent unlike anyone else’s, and the movie chooses to focus on the one aspect of his life in which he is as boring and typical as every other addict who has ever lived. You know the pattern. He starts drinking, then drinks more, then more. Oh, yes, and drugs. And lots of cocaine. Yes, this is what they chose to show of Elton John’s life.
Imagine we were to find out Shakespeare had a weight problem. These screenwriters would center his entire story around the Bard’s visits to Overwaters Anonymous.
But why, you might ask, does Elton became an addict? Oh, but that’s easy. His mother and father were mean to him. “Rocketman,” without irony, presents a portrait in self-pity that is unrelenting, just scene by scene of woe is me, and I’m so sensitive and misunderstood, and daddy’s so weird, and mommy’s so cold — to the point where you just want to say, “Man up, guy. Enough already.”
Really, on the basis of “Rocketman” you’d think Elton John never had a moment of fun. He never had friends, never hung out with John Lennon, never enjoyed his success or his musical brilliance. You’d also think he never had a band — his fellow musicians are nowhere in the story.
Remember how Rami Malek made you think he was Freddie Mercury in the “Bohemian Rhapsody” stage scenes? Forget anything like that here. Egerton has no stage charisma, and in the offstage scenes, he has none of the terse wit that made Elton John appealing in interviews — and made his fans at the time feel like they knew him. Egerton’s Elton is instead a self-centered mope, and that’s even when he’s sober.
Still you might think, OK, fine, but at least we’ll get the story of Elton John’s career. But no, we don’t. The strategy here is that everything is a fantasy mishmash, not just the music sequences. Thus, we see Elton hawking songs in the 1960s to music publishers, and the songs he’s offering are things he’d write 15 years later.
When he plays the Troubadour in Los Angeles — his breakthrough show from 1970 — he opens with “Crocodile Rock,” which hadn’t been written yet. The switch doesn’t make for a better scene, because the actual song he did open with (“Your Song,” which hadn’t yet been released in the United States) was better.
But hey, if they don’t care, why should we? On the same street as the Troubadour, we see a marquee advertising Jimmy Carter’s victory party — about six years too early. Also six years early, the single, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Oh, yeah, and 10 years too late? “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me,” which the movie seems to show him writing in 1984. Also, in 1984, Elton still looks the way he did in 1973. That is, not bald.
Obviously, none of this would matter if there were a shred of joy in “Rocketman,” but no, we don’t get that, not even a shred. Instead it’s two hours of laugh-clown-laugh misery.