Fashion
‘Elton John: Never Too Late’ Burnishes a Career (but Charmingly)
The star is in positive, future-looking mode in this Disney+ documentary, directed by his husband, David Furnish, and R.J. Cutler.
When you’ve been as famous as Elton John for as long as Elton John — he’s been a solo professional for 55 years — it can be hard to find a new way to tell your story. The contours of his career are almost archetypal for a musician: early virtuosic success, a crash-and-burn moment, then redemption. In John’s case, that redemption story is tied up with both getting sober and meeting David Furnish, who later became his husband, in the early 1990s.
Furnish directed a 1997 TV movie, “Elton John: Tantrums & Tiaras,” which chronicled the singer’s balance between public and private life. In 2019, the jukebox musical biopic “Rocketman,” starring an excellent Taron Egerton and directed by Dexter Fletcher, recounted John’s life in lightly fantastical mode, as befits the subject.
Now Furnish, along with the seasoned documentarian R.J. Cutler, has directed another film about John that, while quite obviously intended to extend and burnish his reputation in his post-touring years, feels heartfelt and charming in a way films like this can’t usually pull off. “Elton John: Never Too Late”(streaming on Disney+) blends two timelines. Archival footage and excerpts from John’s diaries provide the first one, a look back at his early career, as well as his struggles to publicly own his sexuality and addictions.
