Dexter Fletcher (2019)
Proximity of release consigns the Elton John biopic Rocketman to inevitable comparison with the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Will Elton languish in the commercial shadow of the phenomenally successful Freddie or benefit from arriving in his slipstream? It’s likely the answer to both questions will be yes. (Worldwide box-office receipts for Bohemian Rhapsody currently stand at $903.2m.) Will Rocketman emulate its forerunner in the awards stakes when the time comes? That seems improbable, though no more improbable than the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody won more Oscars this year than any other film. Watching Rocketman reminded me how much I liked some of Elton John’s songs in the 1970s – and made me suspect I was unfair to Dexter Fletcher in blaming the bad direction of Bohemian Rhapsody as much on him as on the discredited (yet still officially credited!) Bryan Singer. Nobody is going to claim that Rocketman is a work of great depth or imagination – let’s hope not, anyway. But thanks to its combination of songs and story, it delivers emotionally and is wonderfully entertaining.
Lee Hall’s screenplay frames the narrative in Elton John’s participation in an Alcoholics Anonymous group, with longer flashbacks charting the first forty or so years of his life. The closing legends tell us that John has now been sober for nearly thirty years, which means the AA session is happening circa 1990. The decision not to go beyond this point in time means that twenty-nine-year-old Taron Egerton, in the lead role, doesn’t need major aging make-up. For this viewer, the cut-off point had other benefits too – no ‘Goodbye, England’s Rose’, for a start. John’s humanitarian work has benefited many but his public pronouncements are often pompous nowadays: it’s a relief that reference to his AIDS Foundation’s fund-raising achievements is limited to another few words of text on the screen at the end. Rocketman, though it clearly means audiences to like and admire its leading man, is far from a hagiography. Elton John and his husband David Furnish have been trying to make this film happen for approaching two decades, and are credited among the executive producers and producers respectively. But the result is noticeably less pussyfooting about, for example, its subject’s sex life than was Brian May’s and Roger Taylor’s posthumous tribute to Freddie Mercury.
The framing device is clumsy but serviceable. Elton joins the circle wearing one of his outrageous stage outfits. Introducing himself to the group, he says ‘…and I’m an alcoholic’ only for starters: he goes on to list his other hang-ups and obsessions – narcotics, bulimia, shopping, and more. (The shopping addiction, according to the final captions, still isn’t cured.) In the culminating AA sequence, the protagonist sees key figures in his life – among them, his self-centred, belittling mother Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), his loving, loyal grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones) and his ophidian manager John Reid (Richard Madden) – materialise in the room. Elton’s now able to speak his mind to them and not before time. He becomes a star quite early in the film; once he does, his tale reduces to repeated, often garish illustrations of the gulf between professional success and personal torments. The story is going nowhere except towards its inevitable happy ending but the high energy level is sustained by the performances and the music. Dexter Fletcher and Lee Hall, well aware that they’re telling a remarkable individual history through an essentially hackneyed medium, harness the two elements effectively. It’s as if they accept that the form of the material is pre-ordained, that their job is to colour this particular example of the form as vividly as they can.
Rocketman is so flamboyantly shallow that things like chronological clarity and tidiness soon cease to matter. Fletcher mixes biopic conventions with fantasy sequences justified by the hero’s frequently experiencing life through the prism of mind-altering substances. Some of the famous songs are sung by Elton onstage, others take the form of numbers as in an integrated (or a jukebox) musical. While the great ‘Space Oddity’ outdistances ‘Rocket Man’ as the definitive solitary astronaut ballad, the staging of the title track is enough to make one realise once again how distinctive and touching it is. Chords from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, my favourite Elton John song, are heard tantalisingly at several points. When the song proper finally arrives, it’s sung consecutively by its authors: the lyricist Bernie Taupin[1] (Jamie Bell) goes first, Elton reprises, and the result is affecting. In the early stages, Adam Murray’s choreography suggests plenty of Mamma Mia!-esque dance chaos in store but the crowd(ed) routines turn out to be more rationed than one fears.
The former Reginald Dwight is played as a child by Matthew Illesley and as a young teenager by Kit Connor, and both are expressive. Reggie transforms from Connor into Taron Egerton midway through his performance of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ at a local pub. (In other words, dramatic aptness trumps chronological exactness in the placing of numbers in the narrative.) Having deliberately avoided the Kingsman films and Eddie the Eagle (also directed by Dexter Fletcher) and having not got round to Testament of Youth, I haven’t seen Egerton before. He’s terrific here, not least because he does his own singing and does it very well. It’s a pity he’s not given the chance to do more of the numbers in their entirety. No doubt the singing voice of Elton John isn’t as daunting a challenge for an actor as that of Freddie Mercury but lip-syncing, in a more or less sophisticated form, is such common practice in today’s musical biopics that Egerton’s achievement mustn’t be underestimated. Whether singing, speaking or silent, he never gives the impression of trying to mimic Elton – there’s just the occasional look or intonation that evokes the real thing, and it’s enough. The actor creates an independent character.
Rocketman is too good to dismiss as a vanity project but there’s a strong whiff of physical vanity – or wishful thinking – in the casting of key roles (an impression reinforced by information in the Wikipedia article on the film that Elton John’s first choice to incarnate him was Justin Timberlake). If the online images of John Reid are anything to go by, his younger self wasn’t exactly Richard Madden. A Hollywood Reporter headline announces that Rocketman ‘Blazes Trail as First Major Studio Film to Depict Gay Male Sex’, an episode that reveals Taron Egerton as more trim and muscular than the real Elton has ever appeared to be. Although cleverly costumed (by Julian Day, who also dressed Bohemian Rhapsody), Egerton is never quite the self-conscious ‘fat boy from Pinner’ but no matter. He captures the varieties of Elton’s sexual anguish – shyness at first, fear and guilt to follow – convincingly. (And casting Richard Madden does work – by showing us John Reid, for whom Elton falls hard, through the latter’s eyes.) Whereas Rami Malek’s Mercury struggled to enlarge himself in onstage performance, Taron Egerton has almost the opposite problem: he needs to work to be unprepossessing but the work pays off. Egerton is likeable and makes you like Elton but his approach is never reverential.
The only significant weakness in the supporting cast is Bryce Dallas Howard’s harsh, censorious lampoon of the hero’s mother. Howard would have done better in this limited role to opt for more naturalistic playing, as Steven Mackintosh does in the part of Elton’s equally unsympathetic father. Gemma Jones’s Ivy develops from salt-of-the-earth caricature, complete with old-woman walk, into something with warmth and emotional depth. I loved the performances of Jamie Bell, Stephen Graham and Richard Madden. Bell’s accent moves about a bit but he creates a very engaging portrait of Bernie Taupin, who loves Elton like a brother but is decidedly heterosexual. Both actors convey a genuine, natural rapport in the scene in which Elton and Bernie, paired up to write by the music publisher and ‘handler’ Dick James (Graham), first meet. A bit later, Bell conveys with real subtlety Bernie’s shocked reaction to first hearing that Elton is gay.
The cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed Dick James is a standard-issue pop-industry mogul yet Stephen Graham, who scores with nearly every line he delivers, individualises him. Seeing Rocketman midway through Channel 4’s screening of Shane Meadows’s four-part The Virtues, in which Graham stars and is altogether remarkable, makes one appreciate all the more his versatility. Richard Madden portrays John Reid as callously manipulative, thoroughly professional and skilfully seductive. Bell, Graham and Madden all perform like graduates of the Judi Dench school of acting, whose first rule is that you give of your best regardless of how crudely conceived your role may be, and never suggest it’s beneath you. There’s nothing casual or dismissive in what these three actors do in Rocketman. Their talent and passion have the magical effect of defining their characters with cartoon clarity and giving them human substance too.
27 May 2019
[1] The film reminded me that the first time I ever heard the names Elton John and Bernie Taupin was as the writers of ‘I Can’t Go on Living Without You’, one of the six competing numbers in the BBC’s A Song for Europe in 1969 – the winner to be performed by Lulu in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The John-Taupin song came sixth in the public vote. I can still remember the chorus, though.
