Solid, imaginative, great lead actor, but . . .

Rating: 8/10 (25 August 2019)

I went to see "Rocketman" in early June 2019. It's a fine movie for its type, with the usual strengths (hardworking talent, no expense spared for artistic set design, undeniably great music) and weaknesses (somewhat pedestrian and predictable as well as episodic and fragmentary plot) of the genre.
It does make greater imaginative use of both music and visuals than last year's slightly more straight-ahead biopic, "Bohemian Rhapsody." But I also found it oddly less moving.
I never owned a single Elton LP. At the peak of his fame, in my mid teens, I was already a dedicated prog-head, spending endless hours listening to Yes, ELP, and Gentle Giant (a band led by three brothers who had previously been a UK pop outfit known as "Simon Dupree and the Big Sound," with whom young Reg Dwight toured for a time), as well as my older Deep Purple and Creedence albums, and select items from my father's extensive classical and jazz library.
But I know I had the "Crocodile Rock" and "Daniel" 45rpm singles. And Elton was an integral part of the general, public soundtrack of my adolescence. My girlfriend had the _Madman Across the Water_ LP, someone in my college dorm perpetually blasted "Funeral for a Friend" out the windows into the courtyard, and all the singles drilled themselves into my brain from the radio.
It struck me that these classic rock biopics are pretty similar to all the comic superhero feature films of the past decade or more (most of which I've skipped). Both types begin with the same easy appeal to one's nostalgia, hooking you swiftly into your past -- the people you dated, the places you hung out, the friends you had, maybe even the clothes you wore, as well as your more direct memories and feelings about the tunes and plots.
Which is what makes them instantly enchanting but ultimately -- for me -- disappointing and even empty. They can never fully bring back our past, and too often they fail to hook precisely into our deepest personal zeitgeist. There's an initial thrill of recognition as a character or melodic motif sneaks into the story, and then an almost inevitable letdown as it does its thing, which is never quite what your thing was with it when you were young and much more impressionable.
Several times during "Rocketman" as well as "Bohemian Rhapsody," I just wanted to close my eyes and shut out the visuals because -- no matter how imaginative, how colorful, how hard-working the actors, dancers, and set design -- it didn't live up to my rich emotions and memories about the item being evoked . . . because it was mine, and because it's long gone.
Whatever I was seeing mostly diminished the beauty and majesty of the songs, rather than embodied them or did them justice. Sometimes I want to cringe.
I find myself much more deeply moved and impressed by movies about people I've never heard of, in stories I've never encountered (e.g., "Blinded By the Light," "Maiden," and "Can You Ever Forgive Me?").