Rocketman

Watch Movies TV -(M) ★★★★½

Director: Dexter Fletcher.

Cast: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard, Kit Connor, Matthew Illesley, Stephen Graham, Charlie Rowe, Jason Pennycooke, Gemma Jones.

The Yankees' new uniforms were fabulous.

From the way many people raved about Bohemian Rhapsody, you'd think it was the first time someone had made a movie about a musician. And while it was very entertaining and worthy of many accolades, it was also fairly stock-standard.

Given its recent dominance of the box office (it's the highest grossing biopic of all time at present), it's not surprising that people are using it as the measuring stick when talking about Rocketman. The comparisons also stem from sharing a director (Fletcher stepped in to finish Bohemian Rhapsody when Bryan Singer went AWOL/faced sex scandals/proved impossible to work with), and both films focus on a homosexual hitmaker with a penchant for debauchery whose back catalogue spanned decades and contains some of the greatest songs ever written.

But if we really want to line these two up against each other, it's no contest - Rocketman is far and away the better film. It doesn't hold back in its quest to tell an inventive, garish and decadent story about a man who was inventive, garish and decadent himself.

In case you didn't know, Rocketman is the story of Elton John (Egerton), as told through song-and-dance versions of some of the greatest tracks he and his lyric-writing partner Bernie Taupin (Bell) ever wrote. Encompassing John's early tough home life, his international successes and the depths of his drug-taking, the whole story is framed through a group therapy session as John struggles to figure out where it all went wrong.

Right from the get-go, Rocketman warns you it's not going to be a by-the-numbers biopic, despite its story being a fairly formulaic version of the classic rock 'n' rollercoaster of sex, drugs and piano power ballads. Perhaps realising the Icarus-like story is much like other rock stars, the film-makers have used elaborately-staged musical numbers and the poignant application of John's songs to stand out. And it works, much like John's cocaine-fuelled peacockery did in differentiating himself from the other piano-thumping balladeers of the time. Rocketman leaps out at you, demanding to be noticed.

It's novel approach to the music and subject matter would count for nothing if not for two factors - Taron Egerton and the incredible back catalogue the film-makers have to work with. Egerton is remarkable in what will be his career-defining role. In both the acting and singing stakes he is a wonder, hitting every dramatic and melodic high and low along the way. His voice is not a perfect imitation of John's, but it's often pretty close, and when it's not, it captures the necessary emotion and broadly emulates the film's subject, much like Joaquin Phoenix did with Johnny Cash.

As for the songs, well, they're incredible. Much like Bohemian Rhapsody served as both a greatest hits and a reminder of greatness, Rocketman does the same for the John-Taupin oeuvre. Some people may get miffed at the way some songs are treated - characters other than John sometimes sing, some songs great radical reinterpretations, and some tunes are greatly abridged. But there's a beauty in the way the songs are used, particularly Your Song, Tiny Dancer, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me and the title track.

If anything, there's too much music. Around the halfway mark, hit after hit rolls by, leaving a lot of story to be dealt with via conveniently condensed interludes that sometimes reduce characters to cliches. But, to be fair, this is stock-in-trade for musical biopics, so at least Rocketman has some pizzazz on either side of its truisms. It also does the typical history-rewriting, realigning facts and timelines to suit the story, but to be honest people need to get over this kind of stuff. It's not a documentary - it's a fictionalised account that aims to entertain more than inform.

It's refreshing though that there's little in the way of sugarcoating the kind of stuff that Bohemian Rhapsody merely flirted with or hinted at. Rocketman pulls no punches in showing that Elton John is indeed a gay man who used to take a lot of drugs. Where Bohemian Rhapsody seemingly struggled with this material, Rocketman is out and proud.

A solid cast led by a career-making turn from Egerton help give Elton John's Herculean back catalogue and life story the love they deserve, making this not only one of the best musical biopics you're likely to see, but one of the best films of the year.