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.

The Who’s well-loved 1969 rock opera album Tommy has been adapted for the screen, and is almost the furthest thing from a feel-good picture that you can get.  Who knew that the sound of childhood trauma could be so goddamn catchy?

When I was a young girl, my father would play the album Tommy, he really liked the band.  Tommy was one of those albums I played on repeat when I was elementary school-aged.  My dad had copied the album to a cassette, and me and my yellow Walkman would head to the bus stop every morning blasting “The Acid Queen”.  I’ve mentioned before I was an obnoxious kid, and one memory that has unfortunately stuck with me for like 25 years is this guy on the bus asking my sister to tell me to stop singing out loud to “Pinball Wizard” because it was annoying.  I sunk into my seat as if he had punched me straight in the gut.

Being young, my understanding of the plot was pretty basic, and oh boy, the movie translation of this was um… I was not prepared for the ride I had boarded.   Even as someone who is unbelievably familiar with the source material, this was a rough watch.

Tommy begins during World War 2, and England is getting bombed by Nazis.  Tommy’s mom and dad are on their honeymoon, and when they return, Tommy’s father is sent off to war and is presumably killed in action.  Tommy is born on V.E. Day and never knows his biological father.  His mother (Ann-Margret) hooks up with a dude she met on vacation, Uncle Frank, and when Tommy’s father returns unannounced 6 years later, her lover kills him by hitting him with a lamp.  Dude lived through a plane crash, and its the bedside lamp that finally gets him.  Tommy witnesses the murder, and Uncle Frank and his mom plead with him not to tell anybody.  The trauma of this event triggers psychosomatic deafness and blindness in Tommy.  His parents are understandably concerned about him, even though they are the whole reason this happened in the first place.

His mom is weirdly fixated with his salvation, and takes Tommy to church to see if a supremely uncharismatic Eric Clapton and statue of Marilyn Monroe can heal him.  The congregation, in a very classy move that is not at all disparaging to Marilyn Monroe’s legacy, downs alcohol and prescription medication as communion.  The healing goes about as well as expected.

After this, his Uncle Frank takes Tommy to a prostitute, who drugs and presumably rapes him, thinking it might snap him out of it.  When that doesn’t work, his parents then leave him with one babysitter that beats and tortures him, and another that sexually molests him, so… fun times.  My notes perfectly illustrate how glad I was to watch this series of events unfold.

Realizing Tommy can entertain himself just by looking in a mirror, his parents get loaded on the couch, leaving him alone to wander out of the house.  He stumbles upon a pinball machine in a junkyard.  His parents discover he’s really fucking good at it, and introduce him into the very financially lucrative world of pinball competitions.

My favorite scene in this movie is watching Elton John play a keyboard attached to a pinball machine while wearing the largest shoes I’ve ever seen on a human.  They hinder his movement so much he can only point with his left arm over and over again to show his enthusiasm.  When Tommy wins the Pinball championship, a pack of Waldos haul away Elton’s defeated body.

Now that Tommy’s family is rolling in dough, his parents buy a mansion and a yacht, and Ann-Margret tries to bury her guilt surrounding Tommy’s condition through retail therapy, and literally smothering her grief with chocolate pudding.

I swear to god, Ann-Margret is the only person who actually knew what kind of movie she was filming.  She’s crazed, dramatic, and her voice is so fucking awesome (unlike some of the other actors they cast…).  Still, the disservice of making her swim in a sea of baked beans… which, FUN FACT: sent her into the ER because part of the broken champagne bottle rocketed out of the television when they were pelting bubbles at her and cut her hand large enough that she needed 27 stitches to close it.  She came back to film the next day because she is a fucking queen.

Tommy’s parents take him to Jack Nicholson putting on an haughty accent to see if he can fix Tommy, and all he succeeds in doing is putting the moves on Ann-Margret.  She takes Tommy back to the house and dances him into the mirror, which sets him free to swim and run shirtless across the country without shoes on.

It’s around this point of the movie that I realize Ann-Margret and I have *a thing* for young Roger Daltrey, and I don’t know what to do with this knowledge.

Seriously, she’s only like 3 years older than him and she’s supposed to be playing his mother.  The film industry is so fucked up.

Tommy tells his mother than she needs to relinquish all her material possessions, baptizes her in the ocean, and forms his own pinball-based religion.  His followers treat him like a messiah, looking for him to provide the path to salvation.  He invites them onto his compound, puts his child molester Uncle Ernie in charge of a bunch of children, and Uncle Frank in charge of recruitment and merchandising. 

His campers are fairly pissed they’re being milked for every dime they have, but Tommy is all, “I haven’t handed out my syllabus yet, wait until you hear what the curriculum is going to be!”  When they discover it’s about turning off all distractions and only playing pinball, his congregation are all like, “Fuck that!” and riot, murdering both of Tommy’s parents.  Now that his oppressors are dead, Tommy is truly free.  He runs through literal fire, jumps into a lake in jeans, and climbs a slippery waterfall AND a mountain in bare feet, making me wonder what kind of insurance they had on this picture that they allowed Roger Daltrey to do all of that and hang glide into a sea of bikers. The 1970s were an unencumbered time.

I watched several interviews with Peter Townshend to understand where the idea of this rock opera came about, and holy shit, this story is just based in his own traumatic childhood experiences.  From his perspective, after WW2, the people in England who had lived with the constant fear of sudden death internalized all of their associated trauma.  They had children they weren’t emotionally equip to parent, leaving them to be vulnerable to people who wanted to exploit them.

Tommy’s constant plea in the movie was to be seen and heard by those who were supposed to protect and care for him, only for them to be ignorant to the effect their negligence was having on him.  Tommy tries to save other broken people who need to feel safe, only for them to revolt, take the only family he’s ever known away from him, and abandon him.  This is an unbelievably depressing movie, and the fact it resonated with so many people, I just… I don’t know how to process that, because it’s heartbreaking.

So, yeah, this movie is weird as shit, but it does try to impart that people who are exposed to repeated stressful events will only hurt themselves and those around them if they try to repress those experiences.  I’m not sure the movie effectively communicated what The Who was trying to convey in the original album, however.  I think the message is overshadowed by the strong aesthetic.  

I suffered with intense anxiety as a child (still do, although I have mechanisms now as an adult to help manage it) and my parents didn’t know what the fuck to do with me.  I would say 90% of the time they’d treat my anxiety like I was personally trying to inconvenience them, and the other 10% they’d make fun of me for it.  So there I’d be, trying to hide my anxiety attacks and feeling like I was going to die (or if I was lucky, just vomit) because they’d get angry or tell me to suck it up if they knew what was going on.  I did not have a happy childhood.  I, like Tommy, just wanted them to understand me and show any amount of compassion.  However, watching this movie, I somehow did not find myself relating to his story at all.  I was too distracted by Marilyn Monroe-dressed nuns, a 2-story tall Elton John, child abuse and molestation played off as a joke, and Ann-Margret drowning in bean syrup that I completely missed the intention.  I also think 1970s religious movements had a tendency to be rather exploitative, and I have regrettably listened to far too many My Favorite Murders to not see Tommy’s fans and think, “You’re in a cult, call your dad.”  It’s hard to be automatically empathetic to the abused when they lead others to be victimized by their abusers.

I would 1000% recommend Tommy the album.  This movie is worth a watch if you like The Who, but even as someone who loves the original music, I’m probably not going to put it in my constant rotation.

That concludes rock band movie musical week!  The orchestra nerd inside of me is excited to move on to Carmen Jones next.