Rocketman

"I started acting like a cunt back in 1975....and I just forgot to stop." A line spoken late in Rocketman that explains a lot of the behaviour we've just seen over the last 100 mins. It's one line filled with more truth than the entire film of Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie this will be most compared with. This is so much better too btw.

Elton Hercules John (Taron Egerton) was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight in 1947. As a young boy he took to the piano like a fish to water despite his mother not caring and his absentee father showing him not a jot of affection. As he got older he took on music as a career and a singer/songwriter partnership with a man called Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) sent him into the stratosphere. But being at the top is hard when you're a man craving love and filling the void it's absence leaves with a stew of pills & liquor.

This was really enjoyable. A surreal, cheesy, bizarre, imaginative, funny, sad & exhilarating take on the life of one of rock & roll's most outrageous figures. It's a musical with a lovely experimental edge that has the balls to tell it's story without smoothing off the NSFW edges. Elton John was a gay man with a love for cocaine and director Dexter Fletcher doesn't shy away from either aspect of his life. Amazingly it's taken until 2019 for a gay sex scene to appear in a film from a major American studio. I can't imagine anyone expected a pairing of Eggsy from Kingsman and Robb Stark from Game of Thrones to be the ones to break through that barrier but this is the film that does it.

Sex & drugs aside it's a pretty straight forward autobiography but it's all done with so much energy that there'll be times you'll find it hard to contain yourself in your chair. Famous songs are used in ways you'd never expect, sometimes even sang by other people in moments that give the lyrics other meanings and contexts and make you realise just how universal they are. But the best musical moments are when the man himself is lashing out the tunes. The first airings of Your Song, Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting and especially Crocodile Rock are hair raisingly good. In a nice touch Taron Egerton's own voice is used instead of Elton John's. He gets close enough to the original to keep the songs familiar but adds enough of himself to stop it being a carbon copy.

Singing skills aside he's great in the part. A broken man just looking for a hug. Us music lovers win but the psychic damage done to a child by uncaring parents is hard to watch and Egerton plays it just right. The happy clown. The consummate showman on the outside and a miserable soul within. It's a good enough showing to remove all memory of his last film (the execrable Robin Hood) from your memory. Jamie Bell as Bernie Taupin is always dependable and an almost unrecognisable Bryce Dallas Howard does good wagon as a mammy who never quite connected with her son. Richard Madden plays Elton's manager John Reid as a hateful, nasty bastard and makes a far better showing of it than Aidan Gillen did in Bo Rhap. There isn't a weak link here. Well in the acting anyway.

I really enjoyed this but it's not all perfect, things rarely are. A drink and drug fuelled middle section does hang around too long and goes over certain ground repeatedly to the detriment of other important moment's in EJ's life. Bell's Taupin disappears for a large chunk of the film and things start getting a bit self indulgent and wallowy but there's never a big musical piece too far away thankfully. All in all though it's a biopic done properly. Never boring and always imaginative. Taron Egerton is fantastic in the lead role. It's well worth a watch. You'll be surprised how many songs you recognise too.