Rocketman
Year: 2019
Rating: R
Length: 121 minutes / 2.02 hours
After the critical success of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), it felt like the market was ripe for another movie about a homosexual piano-playing musician. Enter Rocketman (2019), a biopic about Elton John (Taron Egerton) that didn’t quite know what to do with itself. Was it supposed to be the greatest hits of Elton John songs, like Mamma Mia! (2008) was for ABBA? If it was intended as a straight biography of Elton’s life, it falls into all the tropes that seem to be requirements for the genre. There didn’t seem to be anything original here other than sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
One aspect of Elton John’s rise to stardom that I found interesting was his ability to pick up and play any song after hearing it once. This skill is quite a rare trait, and I almost wished this film played up that aspect a little more. I also was intrigued to learn that, while Elton was great at playing the piano, he needed someone to come up with the lyrics for him. Again, it is a great talent to be able to put words to music, which felt like a missed opportunity that was set aside in favor of focusing on Elton’s homosexuality and drug abuse.
I understand that whitewashing these issues doesn’t help tell the “tortured artist” narrative. Still, when the songs themselves don’t integrate well into the story, I felt that Rocketman was too disjointed to make any sense. If you took the songs as well-choreographed music videos, then they’d be great to watch individually. However, they usually stray from the main point of the story when they start, and they don’t seamlessly work themselves back into the plot without some sort of clunky transition. Still, like how Yesterday (2019) was a bland realization of a great idea, at least it and Rocketman contain some excellent musical scores.
A disjointed biography that checks off all the tired tropes, I give Rocketman 3.0 stars out of 5.
