‘Elton John: Never Too Late’ Review: Celebratory Doc Doesn’t Whitewash Its Troubled Rock Star

Elton John has already had a biopic that made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival and won him an Oscar, “Rocketman,” so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d add a bio-doc to the slate of Elton movies. That documentary, R.J. Cutler and David Furnish’s “Elton John: Never Too Late,” premiered on Friday night at the huge Roy Thomson Hall as part of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.

The film adopts an interesting take on a career that has lasted more than 50 years: It focuses on the first few years of Elton’s career and on the last few years, with scant attention paid to the 35-or-so years and 20-plus albums in between. In a way, though, that makes perfect sense, because the nine albums Elton made in a six-year stretch between 1969 and 1975 came with enough drama and enough hits for a dozen normal careers, and because the last six years, in which he planned, began, postponed and finally finished a 330-show farewell tour, feel like an apt summation of his music and his life.

The movie celebrates Elton John, to be sure; you’d expect nothing else from a film co-directed by Furnish, who has been in a relationship with him since 1993 (they married in 2005). But having sympathetic directors doesn’t mean you can whitewash the troubling times, and there’s little sense that “Never Too Late” wants or tries to do that.

Of necessity, the film can’t be entirely chronological; it includes historical segments that chart his troubled childhood, his rise to stardom and the problems that came with success, but it also jumps to scenes from the road on his farewell tour. The former sections make use of lots of archival footage and a little bit of fanciful animation (shades of “Rocketman”) and are narrated by John using audio recordings of interviews he did with Alexis Petridis for his 2019 autobiography “Me.” That book was uncommonly open and honest for a rock star bio, and the voiceovers give the sense that he’s simply telling the story to a confidant, not holding back, censoring himself or performing for an unseen audience.

Even though these sequences only cover a portion of John’s career, they move briskly, with a pacing that borders on urgency. That’s fitting, because he was a pop star in a hurry in those days. As if he was running from a childhood in which his mother beat him with a wire brush to potty training and his father scoffed at his music, he rushed to put out albums, do tours, take drugs, spend money and do everything else that came with stardom.

“I could have had great fun, but when I went home at night, it didn’t really satisfy me,” he says. “I didn’t have anything except my success and my drugs.”   

The historical segments touch on some of the best-known songs – “Your Song,” “Rocket Man,” “Candle in the Wind” – but the film isn’t interested in being a jukebox of John’s greatest hits, preferring to deploy lesser-known songs like “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” and “Amoreena” at key moments.

The 1970s part of the story is mixed with scenes from the 2020s, specifically on the 10 months leading up to the final show at Dodger Stadium in November 2022, his last American concert on the tour.  At first these are nothing more than quick glimpses from the road, but gradually they become longer, and include shots of John’s podcast, where he talks to up-and-coming acts like the Linda Lindas.

The film hits the expected high points – the career-making shows at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the 1974 Madison Square Garden show where John Lennon came onstage for three songs, the original Dodger Stadium dates in 1975 … Along the way, “Elton John: Never Too Late” makes a point of touching on the doubts, pains and excesses that kept him from enjoying his stardom the way he might otherwise have done. But it’s clearly intended to be a story of salvation. The 1976 Rolling Stone interview in which John discussed his sexuality for the first time in public is highlighted, followed by his crucial line, “It did take me 43 years to learn how to function as a human being, not just a rock star.”

We don’t really see the work he was doing in those 43 years, but we see the results. John bringing Furnish and their two boys onstage at Dodger Stadium as part of a show that also provided the movie with riveting versions of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” and “I’m Still Standing.”

John wrote those two songs with lyricist Bernie Taupin 49 and 41 years ago, respectively, but they make a pretty good case that his best autobiography might come in the music, in lyrics written by somebody else but sung in a voice that finds its own truth in them. “Elton John: Never Too Late” suggests as much and is all the better for it.