Rocketman

The doors fly open. Framed in an angelic glow, we behold a figure garbed in a burnt orange Lycra suit blazing with bejewelled flames and equipped with large blood-red wings in an ensemble that can only really be described as a parrot-cross-phoenix-cross-Satan getup.

The figure comes closer, strutting down the sterile white hallway in ostentatious flairs. Devil horns bob in unison with the impact of each red heel. The figure is walking in slow-motion, an expression of ferocious determination plastered across his face. He is sweating. He blasts open another set of double doors to find himself in … an AA meeting.

It’s Elton John, of course, and he’s never looked so utterly derailed yet so delightfully fierce at the same time. He drops himself into a chair amidst the drab-clad anonymous addicts and proceeds to spew forth confessions of his high highs and low lows. Cue glittery flashbacks galore and prepare to be tantalised with more luxuriant costumes and razzle-dazzle glasses than your mental faculties will know what to do with.

Whilst Dexter Fletcher’s direction is flashy, riveting, consistently hitting the sweet spot between camp and noir, it also borrows heavily from his work on 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, recreating almost scene-for-scene the Live Aid gig from BoRhap in Elton’s sparkly Dodger Stadium concert, and relying on the same we-end-where-we-started-from cyclical narrative structure used to relay Freddie Mercury’s life. The drug abuse montages feel 67-79% recycled, though if you hadn’t seen his previous work, Fletcher’s film would undoubtedly score substantially higher, but when you view it in light of his back-catalogue of work, you’d struggle not to think of Rocketman in terms of painful mimicry. In many ways if you’d seen Rocketman pre-BoRhap you’d have a deeper appreciation for how it owns its cheesiness whilst Lee Hall’s (Billy Elliot) script is arguably sharper and altogether more hard-hitting than its predecessor, yet this glitzy blockbuster had the misfortune of being released subsequently and so was doomed from the offset to suffer from beentheredonethatitus.

Taron Egerton’s performance, especially the way he captures Elton’s physicality, is luscious to behold – it’s almost as if he distilled his very essence, bottled it, hung the bottle about his neck on a chain and sipped intermittently from it between takes. From his singing (the production vetoed dubbing so it’s all Egerton and it’s all live) to verbose language and the way Elton clobbered pianos with his boots and stomped all over them is breath-takingly captured down to a shimmering showbiz ‘T’. His ginger wigs are deserving of an Oscar unto themselves, whilst his sideburns should at the very least be nominated. Jamie Bell is a little bit magical as Elton’s best friend and loyal songwriter Bernie Taupin - the two men riffing off each other provides some truly cherry bomb-esque moments. Richard Madden showcases quite a range as the sexy philosophic lover-turn cold psychopathic manager John Reid, who traps Elton in a stifling contract and, though he is perhaps made a little too easy to hate by the end, provides some of the flick’s best zingers. However, his hairpiece looks like it was designed in a Playmobil factory so that is a problem.

The flashbacks do at times suffer from the La La Land saccharine aftertaste of supposedly naturalised musical breakouts, but then, if the producers were going to funnel cheese into a film, this would bloody well be the one, wouldn’t it? Credit where credit’s due, the West End theatrics largely pay off; a notable mention being when John sings the titular track underwater to his spacesuit-clad childhood self during a botched suicide attempt.

Rocketman is farcical when it needs to be and ties the noose around your neck and makes you choke on your own mortality when it needs to do that too. Though far from perfect and a shade less than original, Elton’s story and the visually sumptuous way it is conveyed has resulted in a firecracker fiesta of pure entertainment. 7/10