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‘Me: Elton John’. The Amazing Man Behind ‘Rocketman’, with His Outlandish Stories and Big Heart
Rocketman is a nice OTT piece of art but as a biopic it has many shortcomings. “Me: Elton John Official Autobiography” remedies that.
It all started with Rocketman. The movie struck me as strange and over-the-top when Taron Egerton appeared with a devilish costume complete with horns, because, well, up to that point I thought Sir Elton John was a rather avuncular figure, albeit a rather jolly one. It turned out that somehow, when it came to Elton John’s live performances, I’d lived under a rock, completely oblivious to his presence on YouTube.
I’d seen some photos of him in sparkly costumes but no videos of his famous concerts, such as the ones at Dodger Stadium in 1975, or the one in Central Park in 1980 — or his 2022 farewell show at Dodger Stadium, for that matter —, and my only impressions of him on the stage were formed by the video clip of his 1989 song “Sacrifice” and his 1991 duet with George Michael on “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” at Wembley Arena, which I’d seen on TV growing up as a teenager in the nineties in postcommunist Romania. And when Princess Diana died in 1997, I heard him sing “Candle in the Wind,” the version updated to honor the royal icon’s…
