Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rocketman’ on Amazon Prime, a Crazy-Explosive Celebration of Elton John’s Life and Music

Another day, another biopic of a music superstar who had a lotta ups and downs — but Rocketman, now available free for Amazon Prime and Hulu subscribers, aimed to be less about the story and more about the telling. This version of Elton John’s rise to fame and struggles with love and other drugs is a full-blown, break-out-into-song musical, big and loud and garish as only an Elton bio should be. Although such a method surely bullseyes full-blown, break-out-into-worship Eltonians, the film may have more to offer casual viewers than the usual jukebox-nostalgia formula.

ROCKETMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Elton John (Taron Egerton) strolls into an AA meeting in full regalia — a million-zillion sequins, glasses out to here and devil horns and angel wings symbolizing the hell out of things. He recounts how he was more colorful than every other resident in his 1950s English suburb, because he sings “The Bitch is Back” as a grade-schooler, and his neighbors are all rendered in black-and-white. That’s the kind of movie this is — a literal one. If a hammer needs to be nailed on its head, it will happily hammer it.

I digress. Back then, Elton was Reginald Dwight (Matthew Illesley when younger, Kit Connor when a bit older), the son of an ice-cold motherfather of a father (Steven Mackintosh) and an overly harsh but somewhat supportive critic (Bryce Dallas Howard). He liked playing piano, and landed some gigs down the pub, and he gets older during Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, which is exactly how I feel everytime I hear that song. BUT ANYHOO, he’s Taron Egerton now, and he meets Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), and they immediately sing together right there in the coffeeshop, and the movie sort of becomes a love story of a gay man and a straight man who made so much beautiful platonic music together, you could just freaking weep.

Before long, the chemical explosiveness of Elton’s music and Bernie’s lyrics snares them a manager and a record deal and a trip to Los Angeles, where Elton dons some overalls and glasses that are only like yea-big and levitates the audience a foot off the floor during Crocodile Rock. He meets John Reid (Richard Madden) and falls head-over-gigantic-platform-heels in love. The richer he gets, the bigger his glasses get and the more insanely peacock-garish his outfits get. Soon, he’s taking stadium stages looking like an explosion at the clown factory. Reid moves in as his manager and lover, but it gets real acrimonious; he stays on for the millions of dollars while Elton starts doing the thing with the pills and vodka and blow, and finds himself at the tippy-top and the very bottom at the exact same time.

Performance Worth Watching: Egerton gets it right — a shy-at-heart man who compensates for his shyness by looking and singing very, very loud. His singing voice is spot-on, and he shows just enough heart to keep this movie from being too airy-light or too depressingly earthbound.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t half the film Rocketman is. Director Dexter Fletcher directed both, although he was mostly a hired gun for Bohemian, replacing the ousted Bryan Singer mid-production. That cornball mess was timid (hey, Freddie Mercury was almost sort of gay, mayyyybeeeee?) and ultimately clashed with the spirit of its subject. Rocketman is all gusto, with memorable musical sequences, and sometimes is gay as heck, and all the better for it.

Memorable Dialogue: “My name is Elton Hercules John, and I’m an alcoholic. And a cocaine addict. And a sex addict. And a bulimic. I’m also a shopaholic who has problems with weed, prescription drugs and anger management.”

Sex and Skin: Elton has a couple of tumbles-in-the-hay with fellas, but it’s nothing too graphic.

Our Take: It’s not the story — it’s the style, stupid. Fletcher overdirects Rocketman in all the right ways, with the camera moving and the people moving and singing and everything being a touch overstated but not so much that it’s irritating like sand in your crack. Elton’s robust rockers and heartfelt earnest songs all get their proper due in tonally perfect context, none more so than the film’s centerpiece sequence, in which our troubled superstar glugs some vodka and a handful of pills and jumps into a swimming pool and finds his child self at the bottom, only to be pulled from the water and pushed on stage at Dodger Stadium where he sings the song that’s also the title and then launches right off the surface of the planet just like the subject of the song that’s also the title.

So yes, exaggeration is entirely the point, because to celebrate Elton John and his exuberant and sincere music without hyperbole is to fire the arrow north when the target is south. It shuffles the chronology of his life and songs to tidy up the messiness of things as they are, and follows through on its promise to deliver a “musical fantasy” in all its exuberance. If you want to know all the ins and outs of Elton’s life as it actually happened, well, that’s what boring stuff like Wikipedia is for.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Did we need another straightforward biopic about a pop culture icon? Hell no. But we’re glad this one exists.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Rocketman on Amazon Prime

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