What was the precision of the biopic Elton John's Rocketman?

It's official: the new biopic Elton John Rocketman is a better movie than Bohemian Rhapsody, according to most critics, even me, a superfan queen declared.

Rocketman also plays less fast and less loudly (or should it be slower and tighter?) with the true story of his subject – benefiting from the fact that Elton himself was an executive producer of the film. (A large number of RhapsodyThe mistakes of this film made Freddie Mercury worse than her surviving comrades, Brian May and Roger Taylor, who 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 do not. Of course, it is common for historical entertainment to change the details in the service of history; even HBO is accurate, sober Chernobyl confuses his characters.

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

So let's go down a bottle of truth pills and fall into the precision pool. In this list, as in the (quite true), the suicide dip caused by pills in 1975 at Elton (totally true), the deeper we go, the more the error is serious. Starting with the one that does not matter at all.

7. Saturday night, agree, agree, agree

"Saturday night is good for the fight", taken from the 1973 clbadic Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, was the hardest of Elton's hard rock. The Rolling Stones looked like Englebert Humperdinck. His words DGAF – "I am a juvenile product of the working clbad / whose best friend floats at the bottom of a glbad" – preceded by 3 years the arrival of punk.

It was so presumptuous, but not so urgent, that the young Elton, then simply Reg Dwight of Pinner, sang him like a kid performing in pubs in 1955 (that he played so young is true) . Are we GAF? We do not do it because it's a comedy moment – "play the one I love," says the great Elton – and because it's the most successful musical bonding stage of the film, and can rank as one of the most exuberant dance numbers in the film of the 21st century. The kind that makes us wish we danced in the movie alleys.

It's also a perfect match for the theme. When he wrote it, Bernie Taupin, Elton's lyric genius, was just beginning to think about his childhood in the small town of England and the fights in the drunken bars that fed him.

But not all changes are appropriate.

6. Keep me closer, too big dancer

Image: Mike Maloney / Mirrorpix / Getty Images

In real life, here is how it happened. A few days before the first American Elton show at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1970, Bernie Taupin met a woman named Maxine in strange circumstances: she was the sister of the woman's roommate that one of the members of the Elton group had called to borrow a hair dryer. They get married in 1971, she becomes seamstress of the group and Bernie, noticing the way his new wife danced behind the scenes of the shows, wrote the immortal tube "Tiny Dancer". They divorced in 1976.

This heartbreaking story is not actually part of it RocketmanAlas Instead, Bernie meets his love at Troubadour, and they dance and meet at a party that night, while a lonely Elton looks and sings. Little dancer. While it's a shame to lose the true story, the combination of the timing does not matter, nor does the fact that the woman calls Heather (actually, it's the name of the fourth and current wife of Bernie.)

No, the problem with this scene is the cast: Heather is played by Sharmina Harrower, a very thick supermodel of an actor who dominates Taupin (Jaime Bell). Which rather distances you from the moment when Elton (Taron Egerton), also shorter, begins to sing, choir after chorus, about his reduced size. This is not really the first song to which you would aspire?

Elton has not started to take drugs yet, so you can not even blame him for seeing things. You could say that he's talking about the size of Heather's dress rather than its size, but that would be a bit of an exaggeration.

5. The real-badour

Yes, the club in which Elton made his big debut in the United States is really so small. But it is not true that his management thought small for the event. The publisher of the record company "had adopted a bold strategy: consider it an Elvis that opens its doors in Vegas rather than an unknown artist hitting a city for the first time," wrote music journalist Tom Doyle in the definitive biography of Elton in the 1970s, Elton Fantastic Captain.

This strategy involved taking her to LAX in a big red-decker bus and in other dazzling cascades that mortified the still-timid Elton. The publicists sent him to the company member, Neil Diamond, and brought all his West Coast heroes, such as Quincy Jones. Just spitball here, but it could have done a nice editing sequence!

Rocketman Did Elton arrive without fanfare under a thunderous applause from an unknown group (in real life, they had been performing together for years) before making an appearance in "Crocodile Rock"?

Now, in the two weeks since I saw Rocketman in the excerpts, I went and came in my head on this musical choice. On the one hand, it is obviously terrible. "Crocodile Rock," which would not be released before three years, was the best used light pastiche on Muppet Show.

Considering that what really appealed to the troubadour crowd was that Elton performed Bernie's dark and difficult melodies as "60 Years On" and rock. After hearing Elton's eponymous album, they were waiting for a sleepy person like James Taylor.

On the other hand, the moment when Elton and his audience lose gravity is a beautiful fantasy. And if you want to do that, you need an uplifting song. And at that moment, you realize that very few hits in the 1970 Elton catalog are really optimistic rather than sad and inspiring.

There is "Philadelphia Freedom", but you can not use it when they are in LA. "Bennie and the Jets" is too hard to be weightless. "Honky Cat" is about someone who comes home without leaving for the first time. "Crocodile Rock" is almost the only remaining candidate.

4. a real dick

Another cutting-edge musical choice: in the office of music publisher Dick James, Elton randomly launches some of his hits that would not be written for years ("Daniel" and "I guess that's why they call it blues "), but James pulls him one line at a time.

James was much more supportive of Elton than the film suggests. He saw the singer and Bernie through two albums of material before hitting hard. He was angry when they tried, recorded too loudly in the studio and disturbed the commercial neighbors, and threatened to fire them, but as soon as he heard what they were filming, he found himself face to face. Elton. . They signed a recording contract immediately after.

More importantly, there is no reason to think that a musical savvy impresario, the Beatles on his list, does not know any hits like these two songs when he heard them.

3. The ballad of John and Yoko

Speaking of The Beatles, we think that Elton John created his nickname by combining his Bluesology fellow, Elton Dean (real), with a photo of John Lennon in James' office. This last part is not only wrong – Elton was thinking about another singer, his mentor Long John Baldry – but if you plan on inviting John Lennon to the task early, you're kind of begging to include the most interesting John and the story of Elton later.

Elton became a good friend of the former Beatle in the early 1970s. In 1974, he was playing the piano in "All That You Spend the Night" and was betting Lennon that he would reach number 1. was coming, and the price of Elton was that John Lennon was to join him in Madison for a few numbers. Square garden.

Although it has not occurred in public since the Beatles had stopped spinning and that he had been vomiting nerves before, Lennon had had a whale that night. In the crowd, even though he did not know it, was his wife Yoko, then separated from it. They met later and began to reconcile. Elton helped them together and later became Sean Lennon's godfather.

In Fantastic CaptainThis contrasts with Reg's boring life in the suburbs in 1969, when he bought two goldfish and named them John and Yoko.

Come on, how ready is this story for the movie?

2. Reid is not right

Music Director John Reid does not look as attractive as Richard "Robb Stark" Madden (he is closer to Aiden "Littlefinger" Gillen, who plays Reid in Bohemian Rhapsody). He did not meet Elton after the Troubadour (it was at a Motown party this Christmas) and he was not the first of Elton (that's what it was like). Went to San Francisco, go San Francisco!)

Nevertheless, the outline of their confused relationship between manager, badual and comrade of life described in the film are quite precise. The main shame is that it does not go further by showing its violent momentum.

Elton hinted that Reid had given him more than one slap at a time. This guy had been sentenced to a prison sentence on tour with Elton in New Zealand after being made to have a reporter and having a dispute about whiskey. Again, it's a revelation of cinematic quality.

1. Someone saved his life that night

There is more and more reality hijacking over the film, for example the fact that Elton did not leave the rehab before 1990. The film shows him strutting, cured of his prodigious addiction to coke, then record "I'm Still Standing" (1983). It was not so fast or easy to hit the main nemesis of his life.

But the darkest scenes of change are probably those that took place at the Bernie Taupin meeting in 1968 and the Elton outing. First, Elton and Bernie wrote songs together by correspondence for months before they even met in this café and moved in together. Secondly, Elton was not revealed to Bernie by a visiting American musician.

The man who persuaded Elton that he should cancel the wedding was our old friend not mentioned in this film, Long John Baldry. "You're more in love with Bernie than this woman," said Baldry, himself a proud gay man, to the bridegroom at a party with friends. Elton was not surprised by that – heck, he was barely able to make himself understood – but the subtext was clear to him. (And yes, he attacked Bernie and was gently dropped … at one point in the 1970s.)

Bernie deserves congratulations for his reaction to a key incident a few days earlier, an event the film ignores completely. Miserable about an impending marriage, Elton made a suicide attempt without conviction, putting his head in Bernie's oven and setting the gas on "low". It was Bernie who found it and withdrew it, and Bernie immortalized the whole situation years later in the biographical song "Someone saved my life tonight".

Perhaps you can justify not including Baldry to maintain the number of characters at manageable levels. But you can not really justify the movie's attempt – as timid as the oven trick – to make us believe that Elton and Bernie broke up their writing partnership later. They chatted with others, but always came back to each other without hesitation.

At the end, Rocketman know that the template is in place. The latest tracks tell us that Elton and Bernie still have not had any discussion, despite the overworked scenes in which they seemed to argue.

A more courageous director than Fletcher might have seized the opportunity to build something relatively original in the biopic world of cliché music – a film built around a true, loving, constant, platonic and permanent friendship. Imagine that.