Cannes 2019 review: Rocketman

Cannes 2019 review: Rocketman Paramount Pictures The Elton John musical biopic has drawn inevitable comparisons with last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody – but is it a better film? Here’s the verdict, then: this year’s Elton John biopic is superior to last year’s Freddie Mercury biopic in almost every way: funnier, more moving, more imaginative, more upfront about its hero’s sexuality. More The big concept of the film, written by Lee Hall and brought to exuberant life by Fletcher, is that it is a proper razzle-dazzle musical with lavish dance numbers and fantasy sequences: when a schoolboy named Reginald Dwight tries out Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting in a pub, he is whisked into a choreographed teddy-boys-and-fairgrounds reverie straight out of Grease; and when a 23-year-old renamed Elton John debuts at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles in 1970, he and the audience float magically into the air. Luckily, young Reg was a piano prodigy with perfect pitch, and after a stint at the Royal Academy of Music, he gets a job in the backing band on a soul package tour, where an American crooner advises him to “kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be.” Even when its engine is sputtering, Rocketman is kept in flight by the regularly deployed Greatest Hits A more momentous breakthrough comes when he is introduced to Bernie Taupin, the country and western obsessive who went on to write most of Elton’s most famous lyrics.