Dexter Fletcher
Rocketman

THE REVIEW

After the usual Sunday lunch, the alcoholic part always takes the spotlight, I go to bed without dinner! Quite tipsy. It takes little for me to get "high" and join a collective outing of the stubborn debaser fanbase. A how we were!? Always "Made of Music" mostly, more or less.

Obviously, I can’t manage to do just one thing, even at rest, between one post and another I decide to watch a movie.

Scanning through, I see that on Netflix I’ve watched almost all the thrillers, historical films, and documentaries!

Rocketman is among the new releases I’ve heard about... but Elton John??? Elton has always seemed irksome to me, that continuous and glossy Gay Pride, famous friends, and then who has ever really listened to him? I’m curious though, and after all, I can always stop it and watch something else. I realize though that it’s also a musical, and I can't handle musicals. I force myself to continue...

Meanwhile, the debate on Debaser takes on increasingly deep turns, with the urgency of everyone wanting to say their piece!

The first scene shows the actor (brilliant) arriving with determination, wearing a magnificent red sequin suit with devil wings and horns, "high" on everything and begins his "outing," turning the spotlight on his life as a drug addict and alcoholic in a rehabilitation clinic! In a self-help group. I immediately like him!

I understand that I got to know and "experience" him after his fame and after he had ridden the wave of enormous success.

During the outing, Elton delves into all the causes and contributing factors of his success as an artist but also of the profound failure in life. A father who doesn’t make you feel loved and leaves very early, a superficial mother and above all being "gay" in times when it was liberated to be, but emotionally complicated to live for someone as insecure as Elton.

The real success comes in America, Elton John is a chameleon, extremely well-prepared, and plays a bright and sincere rock and roll, the lyrics speak of life, love, extravagances and he sells, even 300,000,000 records throughout his career. A problem that even unwillingly, I know all the songs, absorbed almost involuntarily like simple sugars.

The film is steeped in aesthetics, a fresco of the seventies I did not experience. Obviously, I don’t want to write the entire plot of the film which needs to be watched and leaves room for many reflections, on art, on love but also on family, they, that generation fought for our freedom of expression!

On the recovery of people with alcohol and drug addiction, we are still very far behind, and the stigma remains forever.

Today Elton John is married and a father. There will also be reflections to be made on this.