It’s only fitting that a biopic about Elton John is a sequin covered fever dream that is full of melodrama and bangers.

Honestly, I should have written about this after I watched Tommy, but here we are.  It was a completely different viewing experience however, because my note taking died halfway through this film while I just sat and watched.  The plot was kind of squishy and malleable and transitions between fantasy and reality, and ultimately it was a journey I wanted to experience unencumbered.

This musical is loosely based on Elton John’s life pre-rehab, and it really dials up every single emotional beat to 11.  The first scene of the movie is Elton, played by Taron Egerton, crashing an AA meeting in full costume.  The leader of the group asks him what he was like as a child, which feels like something a therapist would ask you, not a AA counselor, who, presumably, is trying to guide discussions that involve the entire room?  But it gives the film the excuse to flashback to grade school Elton (whose real name is Reggie), dancing around with all of his neighbors in a cul-de-sac.

It was clear from the opening scenes that this movie was made by a crew who put a ton of love into this project.  The colors in the flashbacks are tinged like a colorized black-and-white photo, while adult and child Reggie/Elton are in full-blown technicolor.  The choreography is interesting, and isn’t shot in a way where you can’t see what is going on… I was sold.

We are introduced to his parents, who are both emotionally absent and don’t seem to like each other or their son.  Reggie cultivates his musical talents with encouragement from his grandmother, as they discovered when he was very young he had an extraordinary talent, and the ability to mimic what he hears exactly on the piano.

Sidenote: Someone do a “I Want Love” and “My Immortal” mashup, cause they’re the same song to me.

His parents ultimately divorce after his father discovers his mother is having an affair, and his new stepdad introduces him to rock music.  Reggie starts touring in a backup band to pay the bills and his bandmates encourage him to reinvent himself in order to stand out from the crowd.

The musical numbers in Rocketman are just so flipping cool.  They’re pure fantasy – colorful and over-the-top representations of Elton’s emotional state.

Taking their advice, Reggie decides to change his name to Elton while persuing a solo record deal.  The label connects him with his lifetime lyricist and writer of “We Built This City” Bernie Taupin, played by Jamie Bell.

I love Jamie Bell so much.  I fell in love with him as a kid watching Billy Elliot and every time I see him in a movie I get so excited.  I spend the beginning of Snowpiercer screaming for Chris Evans to protect him at all costs.  I was so happy to see Elton and Bernie’s bromance featured so prominently in this film because I found their working relationship to be the most intriguing part of Elton’s story.  Bernie legitimately writes the lyrics and then Elton just hears the song in his fucking head like he’s a (pinball) wizard or something.  I always get teared up when I hear “Your Song” (probably Moulin Rouge residuals, honestly), but the scene where Elton composes the song is so simple and sweet, just like the sentiment of the song.

After writing a few promising songs, the record company sends Elton and Bernie to America to drum up some interest by playing a few live shows. Elton introduces his new, flashy look, and although he was nervous as fuck, puts on a performance that has the entire crowd off their feet.

I sound like a broken record, but the musical numbers are sooooo prettttyyyyyy please watch them, they are the best ever and worth the price of admission.  My mother was in college when “Crocodile Rock” was released (her name is Suzie), and when she played the song when I was a kid she would tell me stories about how her and her roommate danced to it while laying on their backs and flailing their arms and legs in the air.  That memory has stuck with me and it always brings a smile to my face.

After the show, Elton meets John Reid, a man who he would start a personal and professional relationship with.  He assists with Elton’s glowup and rides his road to stardom before encouraging Elton to sever his ties with his record company so John can act as his manager.  Now achieving an extreme amount of success, Elton searches for acceptance from both of his parents, but fails to receive the emotional validation he needs to move on from the pain of his childhood.  He then realizes that John, of course, is using him for money and it breaks Elton’s heart.  Instead of firing John and taking back control of his life, Elton attempts suicide in front of a backyard full of people. 

The climax of the movie is the “Rocketman” scene, and hoo boy, it is extraordinary.  It’s the juxtaposition between the lowest moment of his life, and the highest moment of his career set to song.  How they pit-crew style puffed him up and shuffled him on stage beautifully illustrated the machinery-like aspect of the industry.

Bernie tries to convince Elton to take a break and get his head right, but his concerns about Elton’s mental health are consistently dismissed.  It’s only after diving further into his unhealthy coping mechanisms, a failed marriage, Bernie severing ties with him, and a heart attack that Elton struts into AA asking for help.  There’s some really heavy-handed mental reconciliation with the people who have hurt him in his past before Elton checks into rehab and repairs his relationship with Bernie.  The rest of Elton’s impressive career is a footnote to this story.

 My only gripe with this movie is the plot is cliché as fuck.  Elton is established as an unreliable narrator almost immediately, so it’s not like we’re meant to believe this is necessarily the full truth, but it does follow the touchstones of every VH1 Behind the Music.  Broken family, rise to fame, falling in love with their manager, being exploited, turning to addiction and spiraling to rock bottom, rehab, and redemption.  I found it curious that his trip to rehab was when the story stopped, until I started watching the press interviews Elton John did for this movie.  He’s been sober for something like 30 years now, and he stressed that the hardest thing he ever did was ask for help.  I feel like, to him, this movie’s purpose is to show that no matter how bad things can get, asking for help can lead to peace, closure, and success, and that’s extremely admirable.  With that knowledge, it’s easy for me to handwave away my annoyance and enjoy the ride.

Elton specifically requested Taron Egerton to be cast after he worked with him on The Kingsman sequel and insisted Taron record the songs with his own voice.  I thought this was a very smart move asTaron does have the singing chops.  He sounded like Elton without doing an Elton cosplay.  For better or worse, some of the vocals were recorded live because of Taron’s insistence, which he justifies, “I think it’s dangerous in a musical if you start thinking of singing as being something intrinsically different to speech, you’ve got to approach it in the same way.  So you don’t want to film this film that’s filled with dubbed dialogue because it feels disembodied, and it feels disconnected.  It’s the same in a musical.  Characters don’t just sing for the sake of singing in a musical, they sing, because all of a sudden, speech has become insufficient, it no longer does the job required.  It’s a level up in terms of expression.”

We’ve all heard the adage about how musicals work – characters speak until their emotions force them to sing, and when they’re too overwhelmed to sing, they dance – it’s Baby’s First Musical Theory.  But mannnnn, why is it so hard to believe that making your actors sing live over and over again is sacrificing vocal quality for realism?  Honestly, it’s not adding emotion because that’s what the music is forrrrrrr god fucking damn ittttttt.  If you get emotional hearing songs on the radio, or watching a music video, I promise, I fucking promise, it’s OK to have your actors prerecord the vocals.

Saying that… I only have one foot on my Sideways soapbox.  Taron isn’t singing opera, he’s singing pop music, so it’s not like there was an unneeded risk to his vocal chords.  Watching these interviews it is also clear that Dexter Fletcher and Taron Egerton love musicals.  Taron did his research – He references All That Jazz in his interviews as inspiration, and I stan a man who takes his job seriously.  But please, please, pleaseeee stop going to the Tom Hooper School of Realistic Movie Musicals.  Musicals require an inherent suspension of reality, which Rocketman handles beautifully in how it is filmed.  The minute realism is ham-fistedly inserted into a musical, it makes things awkward as fuck.

Welcome to Dexter Fletcher week!  I’ll be posting reviews on the two musical movies he directed.  I was also going to post something on Topsy Turvy because he acted in that for a hot second, but it’s a story about the making of The Mikado and like… yeah.  That’s gonna take some more time to dig into because this list features all kinds of movies with people who causally cosplay other races.

And I’m sorry, guys, this is going to be the most needlessly bitchy thing I’ll ever write.  I’m going to try and be as measured as possible on this one because a lot of people think this movie is fun, and ultimately it’s completely harmless, but Jesus, for an hour an a half it’s a complete slog.

I’m not Scottish, and I don’t know anything about the Proclaimers other than their 500 miles song, and I hate that song.  It’s kind of a meme in the US? Other than it being a musical, I am 1000% not the target demographic for this movie.  In fact, I’m not sure anyone outside of Scotland is?  The lengths I had to go through to watch this movie was insane.  It wasn’t available on any streaming service in the US, I couldn’t rent it on Google or Amazon, and I couldn’t even buy the DVD because they’re not manufactured in a region that my DVD players support.  In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t pay for it since I wouldn’t have watched it again outside of having to write about it.  ‘Cause I’m a yank who is hard of hearing, I was lucky I found a subtitled version of it online *somewhere*, in that space of the internet that is certain to have given me some sort of tracking virus.

Ally and Davy have returned to Scotland after being on active duty in Afghanistan.  Their first stop on their welcome home tour is Davy’s family, since Ally is dating Davy’s sister Liz.  Davy has mixed feelings about coming back unscathed while others in his regiment haven’t returned or were severely injured.  His father, Rab, tries to reassure him he did the best he could out there.

Now that Ally and Davy are back, Liz decides to introduce her English friend Yvonne to her brother.  Neither Davy or Yvonne are super keen on this idea, but after a few shots of tequila and bonding over shared trauma, they start dating.

Meanwhile, Rab and his wife Jean are getting ready for their 25th anniversary party.  Liz and Yvonne take Jean dress shopping while she reminisces about a life less travelled, since she got married and never left Scotland.  Liz takes this cautionary tale to heart and starts applying to overseas nursing programs in order to fly the coop.

Ally, on the other hand, takes this anniversary party as a cue to propose to Liz so they can start their 25 years together.  She’s given him no indication she’s enthusiastic about the idea, but it doesn’t stop him from hyping up his future brother-in-law on the prospect.

The night of the party arrives, and whoops, Rab had an affair within the first year of their marriage and has a secret daughter.  He tries to hide this information from Jean, except she finds a letter from the daughter in his coat pocket (because that’s a super safe place to hide that) while he’s singing about how much he loves her.  She freaks out and storms off, Rab follows her, and Ally takes the opportunity to publicly propose to Liz, which ends disastrously.

Ally starts a fight with one dude because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and heckles him for some reason?  Davy comes to his rescue, which pisses Yvonne off, and the three girls storm off.

The next day, Liz confides in her family her employment application was accepted and she’s heading to Florida, and like girllllll, Florida’s sketch, stay in Scotland.  Her and Ally break up because he’s a baby and doesn’t want her to sow her wild oats before settling down.  He decides to join the army again because he doesn’t know what else to do with his life.

Davy and Yvonne make up because of reasons, and because Dexter Fletcher likes to film songs in front of windows.

Jean, on the other hand, wants to punish her husband for his transgression 25 years ago by telling him he can’t see his daughter anymore.  Her coworkers support her in this decision in a weirdly overly-invested and cheery way?  Rab responds by having a heart attack, which fixes everything.

Yvonne uses this crisis as another opportunity to pick a fight with Davy over a hypothetical situation and they break up, yet again.  Thirty seconds later, they decide they’re in love and we all have to suffer through “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” because there’s no other song that would end this musical, let’s be honest.

You are never, ever going to sell me on a flash mob.  It’s peak cringe.  You’re obnoxiously forcing unwilling people who are just trying to live their goddamn lives to pay attention to you.  AND WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE IN-STORY THEY CHOREOGRAPHED THEIR FIGHT AND RECONCILIATION.  I mean, it’s meta, I’ll give them that, but no, nope, stop it, thanks, I hate it.

I was so bored during this movie I walked away, several times, to grab a drink or a snack and just let it play… I never missed anything.  It was all still there when I got back.  Just a bunch of people casually singing karaoke versions of Proclaimers songs.  As someone who didn’t like the music, the story was not enough to carry me through.

I started watching interviews with The Proclaimers and Dexter Fletcher to get an idea of how this project came about.  The Proclaimers didn’t sound like they cared much about musicals before theirs was made, and that’s totally fair, none of these songs were written with an overall narrative in mind.  Additionally, Dexter Fletcher wasn’t super familiar with the Proclaimers before taking on the project, and had never seen the show.  The creator of the musical, Stephen Greenhorn, came up with the idea while drunk listening to The Proclaimers, and like… yeah, you can tell.  The movie does none of the work to convince us these characters are real people with their own motivations, and every bit of conflict exists to set up a way for a song to be shoehorned into the story.  This movie is about an hour shorter than the stage show, so I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that things don’t feel as rushed there, but it’s pretty disorienting here.

I suppose it’s not a unique criticism for jukebox musicals, but when you’re forced to pull from one band’s catalogue, you have to take some creative gymnastics to make these unrelated songs have a cohesive narrative.  It’s funny to say that on the heels of Rocketman, but we’ll get there…

Anyway, I’m a curmudgeon who strongly disliked the simply glorious feel-fabulous film of 2013.  Good to know ye olde depression is still alive and well.