Elton John: Never Too Late review – thin portrait of a musical genius

In November 2022, Elton John took the stage for a final rousing US performance at LA’s Dodgers Stadium. The show was part of the Candle in the Wind singer’s farewell tour, echoing his 1975 performance at the same venue when he sported the Dodgers uniform, but with sequins.

This time, John would wear a sequined Dodgers-style bathrobe as he said goodbye to a 50-year chart-topping career that hit the stratosphere in 1973 with the double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, when John was living through the highs of incredible fame and success but the lows of addiction and physical abuse.

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The 2022 concert is streaming live on Disney+. Elton John: Never Too Late, a biographical profile performing the belaboured task of providing context, will join it like a fussed-over DVD extra.

The film is bursting at the seams with archival photos, footage and interviews; not to mention outrageous polka dot and bedazzled costumes. The incredible access is expected since Never Too Late is produced by John’s husband and manager David Furnish, who co-directs alongside RJ Cutler. But perhaps that’s why it also feels so precious and tempered.

Candid and intimate moments – as when John amuses himself with a plastic doll of the late Queen Elizabeth doing her British wave or when he tells his sons to stop pestering each other on a video call from the studio – are few and far between. We cling to them as little morsels of John’s warmth, wicked humor and self-awareness, because the rest of the movie is a rather distant reconstruction of the past that leans on audio interviews John recorded for his memoir as its narration. As a follow-up to Rocketman, a dazzling biopic capturing John’s spirit, Never Too Late comes off as mellow and informative – two words I find depressing when associated with Elton John. Though occasionally, it’s the dried-up weariness in John’s narration – as if he has no tears or emotions left to give when looking back at the past – that lends the doc its power.

The excitement in his life was marred by pain, after all. John takes us back to a childhood finding musical inspiration in piano players like Winifred Atwell as he survived his parents’ violent abuse. He recollects his magical early collaborations with longtime writer Bernie Taupin, where, as a young closeted gay man, he had to keep his own complicated affections in check. He speaks openly about how much he was suffering offstage, at the height of his career, because of his relationship with manager and violent romantic partner John Reid and increasingly dangerous cocaine use.

Footage of the young gonzo rock star – in the flamboyant costumes and shades, hammering away at the keys, leaping and bounding on stage and singing to the mountain tops while emulating Little Richard and Jerry Lewis – has the joy powerfully stripped from it by John’s voiceover. “My soul has gone dark,” he says.

The impetus of telling this story now, of course, is that John gets to revisit his music, and the Dodgers stadium performance, nearly 50 years later, from a happy place. He’s in a healthy marriage with two children who are the reason he wants to retire – so he can become the kind of parent he never had. However, the film rarely lives in that space, because the film-makers, who understandably want privacy when it comes to their family, share so little of it. That leaves its emotional arc more assumed than felt.

Never Too Late perks up when the singer recalls his time with John Lennon. The hilarious and moving passage includes an animated recreation of the pair getting high off mountains of coke in a hotel room; and then hiding quietly as if no one was in when Andy Warhol comes knocking. It’s the kind of story we could have used more of.

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The relationship between the two icons would build up to their shared 1974 Thanksgiving concert performance in Madison Square, which, unbeknownst to anyone, would be Lennon’s last. Here’s the thing. The footage from the concert is so dark and grainy that it’s barely usable. But the film-makers, borrowing from Chris Marker’s visual style in La Jetée throughout Never Too Late, recreate the scene with a succession of still photos unfolding over the concert audio, as though emulating the motion and the emotions in the moment.

It’s a lovely gimmick, one where a limitation turns out to be a feature not a bug, in a film that too often falls short because of its access.

• Elton John: Never Too Late is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be available on Disney+ on 13 December