Curator Watchlist
A flamboyant, emotionally candid jukebox biopic that turns Elton John’s rise, self-destruction, and recovery into a full-throttle pop spectacle. It’s more stylized and self-aware than the average music biopic, with strong performances and a willingness to use fantasy to express pain, desire, and reinvention.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 1m
Director: Dexter Fletcher
Starring: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden
The story of Elton John's life, from his years as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music through his influential and enduring musical partnership with Bernie Taupin.
Dexter Fletcher
Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden
A flamboyant, emotionally candid jukebox biopic that turns Elton John’s rise, self-destruction, and recovery into a full-throttle pop spectacle. It’s more stylized and self-aware than the average music biopic, with strong performances and a willingness to use fantasy to express pain, desire, and reinvention.
Rocketman takes a familiar celebrity biography and gives it a theatrical pulse. Instead of pretending to be objective, it leans into performance, memory, and emotional exaggeration, which makes Elton John’s story feel vivid rather than dutiful. The result is a film that is often more alive than most music biopics, even when it follows a recognizable arc.
Taron Egerton is the engine here, delivering a committed, physical, and surprisingly vulnerable performance that sells both the swagger and the self-destruction. The film is strongest when it lets the songs function as emotional shorthand, turning concerts, fantasies, and breakdowns into expressive set pieces. It’s glossy, but not empty; the sadness underneath the sequins is the point.
It does soften some edges and occasionally feels like it’s moving through the life story at a crowd-pleasing pace, but the style is the selling point. If you want a biopic that behaves like a musical and understands the loneliness inside the spectacle, this lands well.
Vivian (4★) · 9549 likes
imagine you’re gay and you’re kinda into this guy and you go to kiss him and he’s like stop m8 I luv ya but not like that and then he goes on to write THE MOST ROMANTIC SONG OF ALL TIME just for you...I’d kill meself
Charlie (3.5★) · 6470 likes
What's your name? Elton Elton what? *looks at picture of the Beatles* Elton Ringo sir
davidehrlich (3.5★) · 4947 likes
ROCKETMAN is so much better than BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY that it’s wild they’re *both* technically considered movies.
Patrick Willems (3★) · 4049 likes
The pitch: what if Bohemian Rhapsody was not bad?
•lily• (4.5★) · 3147 likes
He was a poem (Taron Egerton) But they couldn’t read (The Oscars)
A maximalist musical about love, performance, and emotional excess, with the same willingness to turn feeling into spectacle.
The obvious adjacent music biopic, though this one is more conventional and less emotionally adventurous.
A strong comparison point for the rise-fall-recovery structure and the toll of fame on intimate relationships.
Shares the mix of stardom, romance, addiction, and tragic self-destruction, with big performance energy.
A crowd-pleasing music film about ambition, identity, and the messy joy of making a band work.
A glossy showbiz story that balances musical performance with betrayal, ambition, and emotional fallout.
A stylized rock-star fantasy that blends concert energy, romance, and mythmaking around an icon.
Another jukebox film that uses familiar songs to externalize emotion and create a heightened, dreamlike narrative.
A similarly theatrical biopic that treats celebrity as performance and spectacle rather than plain chronology.
For viewers who like music biopics that fracture identity and treat a life as a series of masks.
A landmark concert film for audiences drawn to the grandeur and emotional charge of live performance.
A more grounded but still performance-driven story about artistic identity, pressure, and self-definition.
music industry, fame and self-destruction, queer identity, addiction and recovery, friendship and creative partnership, family trauma, celebrity performance, self-invention
jukebox musical, music biopic, queer drama, rise and fall, addiction, celebrity, glam rock, emotional spectacle, 1970s, redemption