Reflections of a rock star

Rating: 8/10 (15 April 2020)

A person in an angel-demon costume bursts into a room with people waiting for him, crashes on a chair and begins his confession. His name is Elton Hercules John, and his life is a mess.
When we talk about biopics, it's very cheesy to use the word "special" to describe them. Obviously each of such films is special, because it shows us a story of a unique person, prominent in some way. However, Rocketman is indeed a special case, not just because of who it is about, but because how the story is told.
Usually, the biography movies are focused on a person's achievements and milestones: did this, came there, won that. As if we went through his or her Wikipedia page sections, turning the dry facts into a sequence that's fictionalized enough to make the viewer engaged. The thing about this approach is that it's someone else, a screenwriter or a producer, who does the "guessing" part, trying to get into the protagonist's head and deduce his thoughts and feelings based on his actions. And whether that guessing was done right is usually an open question, either because the person has already passed away (like in the case of the recent Bohemian Rhapsody), or because he's not in direct contact with the crew.
Rocketman, however, has Elton John himself as an executive producer. And from the very start of the film it becomes clear that this is gonna be a story told through _his_ eyes and imbued with his emotions. The whole AA-like rehab meeting backdrop creates a sense that Rocketman is a psychotherapeutic exercise for Reginald Dwight himself, his attempt to solve, or at least acknowledge, the existing lifelong conflicts and issues, and reconnect with his inner child, the latter even demonstrated explicitly, in a very direct but nonetheless touching way.
Another absolutely fantastic feature of this film is how the musical elements are interwoven with the main narrative. Usually the singing and the dancing happens as some sort of a cut scene, which is somehow dictated by the current state of the plot but is generally something you might skip without missing anything crucial. Here, however, music _is_ the plot, the way to accentuate and convey the main moments of Elton's life, the songs' lyrics often given to the characters, basically showing us how this or that song was born and what it was inspired by. The visual sequences of such moments are fantastically surreal and organic at the same time, the Rocketman sequence being maybe the most complex, bizarre but at the same brutally raw act of cinematographic self-expression I've ever seen on screen. These four minutes simply take your breath away, and alone are worth spending two hours to watch this film.
Is there a punch line? A moral lesson for us to learn? A late apology for not living up to someone's expectations? Honestly, I can't think of anything. The only curious fact I've learned from Rocketman is that apparently the guy who produced Elton John has also produced Queen at some point, and his characters from Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman are played by two different Game of Thrones stars and are shown in a very different way. Curious but utterly irrelevant. What's relevant is that music is and always will be for the living, for those who crave to express and to be heard. So live while you do, and love while you can.