It's 1970 and Elton John is onstage at the Troubadour, setting the tone for his L.A. debut with a raucous performance of "Crocodile Rock" when he decides to do a handstand while playing piano and kicks his legs into air behind him.

Suddenly not only John but the entire audience is moving in slow motion, floating on air, getting lost in the magic. It's surreal. And it's not the only scene in "Rocketman" that does its best to blur the lines between reality and fantasy to get at the essence of what the team behind the film would call the "emotional truth" of the story.

Never mind that he wouldn't write "Crocodile Rock" for another two years. Or that the stage move they're depicting did not happen in slow motion.

We've already seen him audition for famed music publisher Dick James with two songs he wrote in the '80s by the time we hit the Troubadour.

As director Dexter Fletcher sees it, John's story demanded a more fantastical approach than a linear rock-and-roll biopic could have provided.

Hence the decision to make it a musical in which characters suddenly break into song and elaborate dance routines.

A film full of fantasy

"There’s lots of really fantastic biopics out there," Fletcher says. "And that’s great. But coming to Elton and his life, I wanted to have an approach that allowed it to have more fantasy and more magic and the kind of grandiosity, in a way, that Elton has in his shows or in his approach to things. And the idea of it being a musical affords that a lot more."

So too does establishing John as the film's unreliable narrator.

In the opening scene, the singer storms into some sort of Alcoholics Anonymous meeting wearing devil's horns and wings and says "My name is Elton Hercules John and I'm an alcoholic and a cocaine addict and a sex addict ..."

And so begins the story of his life. As he remembers it. While in serious need of detox.

"Rather than just a straight retelling of the sort of dry facts and the chronological order of the songs, we have something that uses the music in a different, reimagined way," Fletcher says. "Elton is our narrator and he’s in rehab so obviously his storytelling is somewhat unreliable because he’s not yet better. It kind of makes it through a lens that’s cracked or broken or skewed in a way."

Emotions and memory

Memory, he says, is both an imperfect and brilliant device, allowing the person remembering the scene to invent things, forget things or add things – whatever it takes make the narrative more interesting.

Take that pivotal moment at the Troubadour, which didn't even happen on the night in question.

"If I describe a performance to you," Fletcher says. "And I’m trying to communicate the emotion I had at the time and I say, 'I had this incredible time on stage and it felt like everybody in the room was floating for a moment,' that is something you can conjure up in your head and imagine, and you understand what that would feel like. So immediately you’re connected emotionally to that story. And the musical element of the film allows me, cinematically, to do that."

That was important, he says, because he felt a film about John's life should "have magic and thrill and excitement and laughs and elation in it."

In another key fantasy sequence that's rich with emotional truth, a young John, when his name was still Reginald Dwight, is holed up in his bedroom conducting a make-believe symphony orchestra using a flashlight baton.

"How do you write how a small nine-year-old boy feels so isolated and lost from his family and so unloved, not even hugged, that music becomes his great escape and savior and something that he owns and it gives him the love and warmth that he needs?" Fletcher asks.

"That’s a big, quite complex thing to write dramatic scenes around without being really trite or expositional. But if you give that kid a flashlight and an orchestra in his bedroom and a moment of musical fantasy, then hopefully the audience, when they watch it, will see that that’s his escape. That’s where he feels something that is his own. And that answers a lot to me who Elton John grows up to be. That scene is 30 seconds long and a lot of information hopefully is communicated in that very sort of imaginative, wonderful moment of that small boy playing the grand piano on his bed."

Elton John's role in the film

That small boy with the flashlight who feels isolated from his family is in many ways what drives the older version of that same boy to succeed, as Fletcher came to understand while talking to the film's executive producer, Elton John.

"We spoke about his parents and he said a couple things that really informed how I approached them," Fletcher says. "He told me that his father never saw him play live. And you’re talking about a man who played to 90,000 people at Dodgers Stadium at the age of 27. It’s a huge thing. If you thought that your parents never took any kind of interest in what you saw to be who you were and what you did, I don’t know how that would affect you. Or I can imagine how that would affect you. And I had to address that in the film."

The other thing John told him was "My mum could give with one hand and take with the other," Fletcher says. "And that’s a very big statement."

As to how involved John was in the proceedings, Fletcher says, "Well, he certainly spent a lot of time with Lee Hall, the screenwriter, over the last few years, certainly the last 10 years, telling stories and memories to Lee, who then crafted this story, this script."

But as the movie went into production, John was busy doing other work – specifically his farewell tour.

"And after some very careful vetting and considerable lunches and talking and looking at everything," Fletcher recalls, "he went 'OK, you’ve got to go do what you’ve got to do now.' Elton saw the rushes, and the dailies went to all the producers every day. And I never one time had a call to say 'That didn’t happen' or 'No, you can’t do that.' Elton was very clear from the outset to me when I met him that there was nowhere that I couldn’t shine a light, that there was nowhere that was out of bounds as far as he was concerned. Whereas other biopics might not want to do that because people are sadly not around anymore and can’t defend themselves, Elton can. He’s here. And he can address questions that people might have about its authenticity."

Fletcher says he realized doing other biopics that it’s "counterproductive to be slavish to the facts," especially when you're dealing with a story that unfold over the course of 30 years.

"You can’t make a film that lasts 30 years long," he says. "You’ve got two hours. So you have to truncate and bend and invent and change the order of things. For me, the film, where it’s successful, is that emotionally and psychologically, it feels like it’s connected from one moment to the next. It’s consistent in that respect. And that’s where it’s factually correct. You know, Elton’s around. And if you press him on any given moment in the film, he’ll tell you whether it’s correct or not. Not whether it’s correct factually, but 'Is that how you felt?' And I believe that he would say 'Yes.'"

An actor's commitment to the role

It helps to have an actor, Taron Egerton, who inhabits the role with such conviction, it feels like watching Elton John. Of course, it helps that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the man he's asking you to think he is.

"I think the uncanny resemblance is more about an honesty and a truth to what Taron does as an actor," Fletcher says. "And I think that’s why we’re drawn into that performance so quickly. There’s only one person in the world who looks like Elton John, and that’s Elton John. I could search the world for someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to him, but can he act? Can he sing? Can he move? Probably not. So Taron doesn’t only bring a passing resemblance to a young Elton John. He also brings the most key factor. He can act and he can sing and he can throw himself into this role with such a profound commitment that it doesn’t even allow us to question that he’s not who we’re saying he is. It doesn’t cross your behind, not because Taron looks a bit like Elton John but because his commitment is so deep that he believes he is Elton John. So he doesn’t give us the option to not believe."

It took a lot of courage, Fletcher says, for John to put himself through this whole process.

"Elton has to be braver than all of us to let me dig around in his psychological underwear drawer and pull out what it is that I find interesting," he says. "It’s a certain kind of person that is at a certain kind of place that allows that to happen. And I’m respectful and mindful of that. But loving him as I do and respecting him as I do, I’ve gotta be honest about what is there. And you know, he paid me the most extraordinary compliments after seeing the film. Extraordinary, that moved me to tears. Because it’s so personal for him."

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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