by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
Last night’s “feature” was Rocketman, the 2019 sort-of biopic of Elton John (the
distributors, Paramount, called it “a musical fantasy about the fantastical
human story of Elton John‘s breakthrough years,” which warned me not to expect
a literal depiction of the story), directed by Dexter Fletcher from a script by
Lee Hall. The film opens with Elton John (Taron Egerton, a straight actor who
predictably gave interviews in which he said the hardest part of his role was
having to kiss men on screen to portray the Gay Elton John) walking into a
rehab group in New York in a burnt-orange costume designed to make him look
like the Devil. We later learn that he bailed out on a sold-out concert at
Madison Square Garden to seek rehab for his various addictions — alcohol,
cocaine, sex and shopping — though the real-life Elton John not only played
that concert in 1974 but invited John Lennon to join him for the encores. (John
had played on Lennon’s solo single “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and
had dared him to perform with him at the Garden. Lennon, petrified of
performing live again, said, “I’ll only do it if ‘Whatever Gets You Through the
Night’ hits number one on the U.S. charts” — which it did. It was Lennon’s last
live performance ever, even though he had six more years to live.) The obvious
inspiration for this film, both in subject matter and structure, was Beyond
the Sea, the stunning 2004 biopic
of Bobby Darin directed and co-written by and starring Kevin Spacey, but
virtually none of the publicity surrounding Rocketman mentioned Beyond the Sea because, thanks to the accusations of Spacey
making sexual advances on teenagers, Spacey has fallen afoul of the “#MeToo”
witchhunters and become an Orwellian “unperson” in Hollywood: “He does not
exist. He never existed.” (In Beyond the Sea a Gay man, Kevin Spacey, played a straight man,
Bobby Darin; in Rocketman a straight man, Taron Egerton, played a Gay man, Elton John.) Rocketman borrows quite a few devices from Beyond the Sea, including having Elton John as a boy (Matthew
Illesley) — called “Young Reggie” after Elton’s real name, Reginald Kenneth
Dwight — not only appear in scenes of Elton’s childhood but interact on screen
with Egerton as the adult Elton John. Like Rocketman, Beyond the Sea is framed as its subject taking stock of his life
and looking back on it — in Beyond the Sea the gimmick was that Bobby Darin was preparing to direct and star in a
biopic of himself — and both films present their subjects’ songs not as
straightforward performances but as musical production numbers.
The scene
showing Elton John’s U.S. debut at Doug Weston’s (Tate Donovan) Troubadour
nightclub in Los Angeles shows him literally levitating not only himself but his audience as
well — many of them members of rock royalty themselves, including Neil Young
and “half the Beach Boys.” (In his 1982 autobiography Wouldn’t It Be Nice? Brian Wilson recalled a young, scared Elton John
showing up at an L.A. hotel to meet him and play him his songs. Elton played
most of what became his first two U.S. album releases, Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection, and the quality of Elton’s material freaked Brian
Wilson out and helped convince him that he was burned out as an artist and the
future belonged to younger performers like Elton John.) I’ve had a lot of
conflicted feelings about Elton John over the years: when he first came on the
scene I thought he was good but incredibly overrated (the Down Beat reviewer of the Elton John album said he’d received more “hype” on him than
any other artist he’d written about — literally pounds of press releases and other publicity from his
record label). It didn’t help with me that his first U.S. hit was “Your Song,”
a drearily sappy romantic ballad that remains my least favorite Elton John song
— and given that Elton famously writes only the music to his songs I joked that
the lyric should be, “I hope you don’t mind/That my friend Bernie/really wrote
the words” — though I liked some of his other early pieces, including “Border
Song” (triumphantly covered by Aretha Franklin, who not surprisingly made far
more of its Black-gospel rip-offs than Elton did!), “Take Me to the Pilot” and
“Burn Down the Mission,” a lot better. I was put off by the Tumbleweed
Connection album because it took
feints at the country-music tradition (the movie depicts John and Bernie
Taupin, played by Jamie Bell and depicted as the voice of reason in John’s
life, as country-music fans at a time when country music was considered
hopelessly retro — when Dick James, played by Stephen Graham as a cigar-chomping
stereotype of a music industry profiteer, auditions Elton John he says he hopes
he doesn’t play “Streets of Laredo,” and later John and Taupin jokingly sing a
duet of that song) but totally misunderstood it.
Besides, in the early 1970’s my hero was David Bowie, who was openly Bisexual and
presented as such while Elton John was still playing the coy Liberace game —
“I’ll act so blatantly like one that no one will believe I could actually be one!” (One of the few touches of irony in Lee
Hall’s script is that Elton calls to come out to his mother while she’s
watching a TV show featuring Liberace.) Ironically, John later definitively
came out as Gay while Bowie edged away from the Gay world — Bowie ended up in a
long-term relationship with a woman (his second wife, the supermodel Iman) and
John in a long-term relationship with a man (his husband David Furnish, who’s
listed as one of the four “executive producers” of this film). Rocketman is a good movie that had the potential to be a
great one — it’s entertaining as it stands but a lot more could have been made of the conflicts between
Elton John’s celebrity and his sexual identity. The real Elton John came out as
Bisexual in a Rolling Stone interview in 1976 — and his record sales plummeted immediately and
didn’t recover until a year and a half later, when he married a woman: his
sound engineer, Renate Mueller. (Their relationship is depicted in the film but
only in one scene in which she’s helping mix one of his albums.) After cranking
out best-selling records at a breakneck pace in the early 1970’s (according to
this movie, his initial contract with Dick James’ record label called for three
albums per year — more than almost anyone, especially a singer-songwriter, did in that time!) Elton John released
nothing between early 1976 and
late 1978, when he put out a single co-written with Bernie Taupin, “Ego,” and
then worked with other lyricists (Gary Osborne and openly Gay British rocker
Tom Robinson) on a 12-inch EP produced in disco style by Philadelphia soul
master Thom Bell and then a full-length album that at least started to rebuild his commercial standing, even though
his sales never again reached the heights they had in the mid-1970’s.
My
favorite Elton John song of this period — indeed, of all time — was “Flinstone
Boy,” a song he sneaked out as the B-side of the “Ego” single and which not
only directly and unmistakably depicted the Gay lifestyle but was unusually
personal in that Elton John wrote it entirely himself, words as well as music. I
wish a film that dealt with Elton John’s growing awareness of his own sexuality
— in the movie he gets his first male-to-male kiss from a Black soul singer his
early band, Bluesology, is backing up on a British tour, and his first serious
affair is with his manager, John Reid (Richard Madden), with whom he abruptly
breaks up with after catching him getting a blow job from someone else at a
party — would have included “Flinstone Boy.” As it is, Rocketman emerges as a “Behind the Music” special stretched
out to feature length with big production numbers — it’s still the story of
popular but alienated rock star drinking, drugging and screwing himself to
near-oblivion before he finally sees the light, sobers up and finds true love,
or at least a stable relationship — and though Taron Egerton does his own
singing well enough he doesn’t have the unearthly falsetto Elton John had in
the early days. Then again, Elton John doesn’t have it either: I joked to
Charles after we watched the movie that Egerton doesn’t sing as well as the
young Elton John but is
considerably better than the current one, whose voice we hear over the closing
credits in the new song John and Taupin contributed to the film, “I’m Gonna
Love Me Again” — the old Hollywood dodge of dragging a new song into a film so
they’ll have a piece eligible for the Academy Award for Best Song (which it
won).
