Just how accurate was Elton John biopic ‘Rocketman’?

It’s official: the new Elton John biopic Rocketman is a better movie than Bohemian Rhapsody, according to most reviewers — even me, an avowed Queen superfan. 

Rocketman also plays less fast and loose (or should that be slower and tighter?) with the true history of its subject — benefitting from the fact that Elton himself was an executive producer on the film. (Many of Rhapsody‘s errors just so happened to make Freddie Mercury look worse than his surviving bandmates, Brian May and Roger Taylor, who just so happened to be consultants on the film.)

Nevertheless, the film is riddled with biographical errors big and small. Some are deliberate and work, some are deliberate and don’t. Sure, it’s common for historical entertainment to change details in service of the story; even HBO’s accurate, sober Chernobyl conflates its characters.

The thing about Rocketman, as with Bohemian Rhapsody, is that the truth is actually wilder and would often be better for the story than the biopic version that ended up on screen. 

So let’s down a bottle of truth pills and fall into the swimming pool of accuracy. In this list, as in Elton’s (totally true) 1975 pill-fueled suicide plunge, the deeper we go, the more of a mistake it is. Starting with one that doesn’t matter at all. 

7. Saturday night’s alright, alright, alright

“Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”, from the 1973 classic Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, was Elton’s hardest of hard rock. It made the Rolling Stones sound like Englebert Humperdinck. Its DGAF lyrics — “I’m a juvenile product of the working class/whose best friend floats in the bottom of a glass” — preceded the arrival of punk by 3 years. 

So it was prescient, but not so prescient that young Elton, then merely Reg Dwight from Pinner, sung it as a kid performing in pubs in 1955 (that he performed so young is true). Do we GAF? We do not, because it’s a comedy moment — “play that one I like,” says Elton’s gran — and because it’s the most successful of the movie’s musical linking scenes, and may rank as one of the most exuberant   dance numbers in 21st century film. The kind that makes you wish we danced in cinema aisles.  

It’s also a perfect match for the theme. When he wrote it, Elton’s lyrical genius pal Bernie Taupin was just beginning a phase of reflecting on his childhood in small-town England and the drunken pub brawls that fuel it.

But not all of the changes are anything like this appropriate. 

6. Hold me closer, too tall dancer 

In real life, here’s how it went down. Days before Elton’s make-or-break, first-ever U.S. show at the Troubadour in LA in 1970, Bernie Taupin met a woman named Maxine under bizarre circumstances: she was the sister of the flatmate of the woman that a guy in Elton’s band called to borrow a hair dryer. They married in 1971, she became a seamstress for the band, and Bernie, noting the way his new wife danced in the wings at shows, wrote the immortal hit “Tiny Dancer.” They divorced in 1976.

That heart-wrenching tale doesn’t make it into Rocketman, alas. Instead, Bernie meets his love at the Troubadour, and they dance and hook up at a party that night while a lonely Elton gazes on and sings Tiny Dancer. Though it’s a shame to lose the  true story, the conflation of timing doesn’t really matter, nor does the fact that the woman is called Heather (actually the name of Bernie’s fourth and current wife.) 

No, the problem with this scene is the casting: Heather is played by Sharmina Harrower, a tall thin supermodel of an actor who towers over Taupin (Jaime Bell). Which rather takes you out of the moment when the also-shorter Elton (Taron Egerton) starts singing chorus after chorus about her diminutive height. It’s … not really the first song you’d reach for? 

Elton hasn’t even begun his descent into drugs at this point, so you can’t even accuse him of seeing things. You could say he’s talking about Heather’s dress size rather than her height, but that would be a bit of a (pun not intended) stretch. 

5. The True-badour 

Yes, the club that Elton made his big U.S. debut in really is that small. But it’s not true that his management thought small for the event. The record company publicist “had adopted a bold strategy: let’s treat him as if he’s Elvis opening in Vegas rather than an unknown artist hitting town for the first time,” writes music journalist Tom Doyle in 2017’s definitive Elton-in-the-1970s biography Captain Fantastic. 

That strategy involved picking him up at LAX in a big red double-decker bus, and other flashy stunts that mortified the still-shy Elton. The publicists sent him to company stablemate Neil Diamond’s house and brought all his west coast heroes to the show, such as Quincy Jones. Just spitballing here, but that might have made a nice montage sequence! 

Rocketman has Elton arrive with zero fanfare to a smattering of applause uncertain audience with an unfamiliar band (in real life they’d been performing together for years) before striking up “Crocodile Rock.” 

Now, in the two weeks since I saw Rocketman in previews, I’ve gone back and forth in my head on this musical choice. On the one hand, it’s a demonstrably terrible one. “Crocodile Rock,” which wouldn’t be released for another three years, was lightweight pastiche best used on the Muppet Show.

Whereas what actually wowed the Troubadour crowd was that Elton took his and Bernie’s dark, difficult early tunes like “60 Years On” and made them really rock. Having heard Elton’s self-titled album, they were expecting someone sleepy like James Taylor. 

On the other hand, the bit where Elton and his audience becomes weightless is a lovely bit of fantasia. And if you’re going to do that, you need an uplifting song. And at that point it dawns on you that very few hits in Elton’s 1970s catalogue are truly upbeat rather than sad and soulful. 

There’s “Philadelphia Freedom,” but you couldn’t use that when they’re in LA. “Bennie and the Jets” is too stompy to be weightless. “Honky Cat” is about someone going home, not leaving it for the first time. “Crocodile Rock” is pretty much the only candidate left standing. 

4. A Real Dick 

Another musical choice that kind of falls flat: in the office of music publisher Dick James, Elton randomly pitches a couple of his hits that wouldn’t be written for years (“Daniel” and “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues”), but James shoots him down one line in each time. 

James was much more supportive of Elton than the movie makes out. He saw the singer and Bernie through two albums of material before they hit the big time. He did get mad when they were trying out, recording too loudly in the studio and disturbing the commercial neighbors, and threatened to fire them, but as soon as he heard what they’d been laying down on tape, he was all in on Elton. They inked a recording deal immediately after.

More importantly, there is nothing to suggest a canny music impresario with the Beatles on his roster would not know hits like those two songs when he heard them. 

3. The ballad of John and Yoko 

Speaking of the Beatles, we’re led to believe Elton John created his moniker by combining Bluesology bandmate Elton Dean (true) with a photograph of John Lennon in James’ office. This last part is not only untrue — Elton was thinking of another singer, his mentor Long John Baldry — but if you’re going to bring John Lennon into it at the beginning, you’re kind of begging to include include the most interesting John and Elton story later on. 

Elton became good friends with the former Beatle in the early 1970s. In 1974 he played piano on John’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and made a wager with Lennon that it would hit number 1. It did, and Elton’s price was that John Lennon would have to join him for a couple of numbers at Madison Square Garden.

Though he had not performed in public since the Beatles stopped touring, and vomited with nerves beforehand, Lennon had a whale of a time that night. In the crowd, though he didn’t know it, was his then-estranged wife Yoko. They met afterwards and began to reconcile. Elton helped bring them back together, and later became godfather to Sean Lennon. 

In Captain Fantastic, this is contrasted with Reg’s boring pre-fame suburban life in 1969, when he bought a couple of goldfish and called them John and Yoko.

Come on, how movie-ready is that story? 

2. Reid ain’t right 

Music manager John Reid did not look quite as hot as Richard “Robb Stark” Madden (he’s closer to Aiden “Littlefinger” Gillen, who portrays Reid in Bohemian Rhapsody). He did not meet Elton after the Troubadour (it was at a Motown party that Christmas) and he wasn’t Elton’s first (that happened in San Francisco. Go San Francisco!) 

Still, the broad strokes of their confused managerial-sexual-roommate relationship portrayed in the film is fairly accurate. The main shame is that it didn’t go further in showing his violent streak. 

Elton has suggested that Reid gave him more than just one slap on one occasion, and the guy was actually jailed on tour with Elton in New Zealand after roughing up a female reporter and getting into an argument over the whiskey at a venue. Again, that’s a movie-grade eye-opener. 

1. Someone saved his life that night

There are more and more diversions from reality as the movie goes on, such as the fact that Elton didn’t leave rehab until 1990. The movie shows him strutting out, cured of his prodigious coke addiction, then recording “I’m Still Standing” (1983). It wasn’t that quick or easy to kick his life’s main nemesis. 

But probably the most egregious set of changed scenes have to do with meeting Bernie Taupin in 1968 and Elton’s coming out. First of all, Elton and Bernie wrote songs together by correspondence for months before they even met in that coffee shop and moved in together. Secondly, Elton was not outed to Bernie by a visiting American musician. 

The man who persuaded Elton that he should call off the wedding was our old not-mentioned-in-this-movie friend, Long John Baldry. “You’re more in love with Bernie than with this woman,” Baldry, himself a proud gay man, told the groom-to-be during a half-hearted stag party. Elton wasn’t outed by that — heck, he was hardly even out to himself — but the subtext was clear to him. (And yes, he hit on Bernie and was gently let down … at some point in the 1970s.) 

Bernie deserves credit for his reaction to a key incident a few days earlier, one that the movie completely ignores. Miserable about impending marriage, Elton made a half-hearted suicide attempt, sticking his head in Bernie’s oven and sticking the gas on “low.” It was Bernie who found him and yanked him out, and Bernie immortalized the whole situation years later in the biographical song “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” 

Maybe you can justify not including Baldry to keep the number of characters to manageable levels. But you can’t really justify the film’s attempt — as half-hearted as the oven thing — to make us think that Elton and Bernie broke up their writing partnership in later years. They dabbled around with others, but always returned to each other without a moment’s hesitation. 

At its end, Rocketman knows the jig is up. The final titles tell us Elton and Bernie have still never had an argument, despite the overwrought scenes in which they appeared to argue. 

A braver director than Fletcher might have taken the opportunity to construct something relatively original in the cliched music biopic world — a movie built around a true, loving, constant, platonic, lifelong friendship. Imagine that.