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Thursday, June 6, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

Rocketman

Paramount Pictures

Ann Arbor 20 + 

IMAX, GT6 Quality 
16, the State Theatre

Taron Egerton (“Kingsman: The 

Golden Circle”) doesn’t consider 
“Rocketman” a biopic. While the 
story revolves around the life and 
music of Elton John, Egerton himself 
filling John’s (platform) shoes, he has 
a point: “Rocketman,” with its all-out 
musical numbers and its elegant bal-
ance of fantasy with realism, isn’t like 
the other biopics.

At the same time, it seems impos-

sible to discuss “Rocketman” without 
invoking another biopic in particu-
lar. Yes, you (probably) guessed it: 
“Bohemian Rhapsody.” Its subjects, 
Queen and their legendary frontman 
Freddie Mercury, have hardly left 
the musician-biopic limelight since 
the film’s Nov. 2018 release, though 
they’ll soon be forced to share the 
space with an increasing number of 
artists. To that end, we have films 
highlighting the lives and/or music 
of Boy George, Aretha Franklin, Judy 
Garland and Céline Dion lined up in 
the near future. In spite of the critical 
and popular success of “Bohemian,” 
however, I would urge the filmmakers 
in charge of telling these beloved art-
ists’ stories to look instead to “Rocket-
man,” if they’re interested in pulling 
off more than their artist’s highlight 
reel.

Where “Bohemian” had trouble 

deciding if Freddie Mercury or 
Queen’s songs were the point of the 
film, “Rocketman” never took the 
man behind the music or his story for 
granted. Where “Bohemian” reduced 
Mercury’s queer identity to a plot 
point, “Rocketman” treated John’s 

homosexuality like it was, oh, I don’t 
know, part of his being a person. In 
short, Dexter Fletcher (“Eddie the 
Eagle”), who took over direction of 
“Bohemian Rhapsody” after Bryan 
Singer was accused of sexual assault 
and was on board for all of “Rocket-
man,” seems to have learned from the 
former’s errors. 

But make no mistake: “Rocket-

man” is not “Bohemian” 2.0. Return-
ing to Egerton’s sentiment, the film 
should not be defined strictly in the 
ways it holds up against other biopics. 
Its innovative employment of musi-
cal and fantasy genre techniques and 

its confident foregrounding of queer 
sexuality are due singular praise.

The musical lended them inge-

nious transition scenes, hinging on 
overlapping lyrics, and at best com-
mendable, at worst forgivable flashes 
forward in the film’s timeline. It’s 
extraordinary how much time they 
covered without oversimplifying any 
events in John’s life (the most notable 
exception being his marriage former 
wife Renate Blauel, but I’m not going 
to gripe about a film that respected a 
queer character refusing to dwell on 
his brief collapse under the weight of 
heteronormative pressure). 

It is also extraordinary what the 

fantastical elements managed to rep-
resent. Each song is magically trans-
ported into the era of its making. 
Gravity is suspended during John’s 
first performance at The Troubadour, 
as John levitates above the piano 
bench and the enthused crowd rises 
along with him. Never have I seen 
those imprecise feelings — the ill-ease 
that comes with revisiting our bygone 
work, the floating sensation you expe-
rience when a musician just moves 
you — so precisely captured on screen.

What excels the most about “Rock-

etman,” however, is not its visual 
splendor or “La La Land”-caliber 
song-and-dance. It’s that the movie 
treats each of its characters fairly. 
How many films could say the same? 
Villains and heroes are formulaic for 
a reason. For a completely different 
reason — above all, its abiding belief in 
the goodness and subsequent redeem-
ability of all people — “Rocketman” 
pays no heed to these formulae and 
dares to criticize its protagonist while 
being sympathetic about why we end 
up hurting the people we’re supposed 
to love. We see this in another of the 
film’s innovations: Remaking solos 
into duets, trios and the like. Picture 
this: John sings the opening lyrics to 
“I Want Love,” when suddenly, the 
people he’s singing about claim some 
of the lines. His flawed mother (Bryce 
Dallas Howard, “Jurassic World”), 
his cold father (Steven Mackintosh, 
“Urban Hymn”), his steadfast grand-
mother (Gemma Jones “God’s Own 
Country”). These thoughtful recre-
ations remind us that we sing along to 
songs about real people.

How to tell a star’s story

JULIANNA MORANO 

Summer Managing Arts Editor

FILM REVIEW

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

When I received Ocean Vuong’s 

debut novel “On Earth We’re Brief-
ly Gorgeous” in the mail, I read the 
jacket description to my mother 
immediately. It began, “‘On Earth 
We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ is a letter 
from a son to a mother who cannot 
read.” She stopped me there, ask-
ing if the book was a first edition, 
and told me to keep it safe. Even 
from that one sentence, not even 
having read the book, my mother 
knew that Vuong’s writing was 
special. Having read it, I know 
that is true, and 
that his writing is 
beyond special — 
it is a distillation 
of emotion that 
only a poet could 
achieve, 
captur-

ing the intensity 
of 
familial 
and 

romantic love in 
a way that’s near-
ly impossible to 
explain. From the 
first words of the 
jacket to the last of 
his acknowledge-
ments, Vuong has 
created a world of his own within 
the confines of a novel, pushing his 
readers so deeply into the experi-
ence of his characters that it feels 
like they’ve lived it themselves. 

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gor-

geous” is a book about the immi-
grant experience, and it is also a 
book about the queer experience. 
It is a book about a son’s love for 
his mother, for his grandmother, 
for his family’s homeland and the 
home they built away from it. In 
another writer’s hands, this would 
surely be too much to address in 
one novel. But Vuong, in his first 
foray into fiction, is more than 
capable of handling all of these 
things. In truth, the realities of 
being human are not easily swal-
lowable, and certainly more com-
plicated than we wish they were. 
Vuong knows this well and weaves 
each aspect of his semi-autobio-
graphical story through the lens 
of personhood, making the big 
picture distinguishable among its 

million puzzle pieces. 

The book begins at the onset of 

narrator Little Dog’s childhood, 
as he collects scattered memo-
ries of his mother to share with 
her. Vuong’s skill as a poet (hav-
ing won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 
2017) is immediate in these first 
pages. Through a mix of abstract 
description and fleeting emotion, 
he stabilizes memory despite its 
ephemeral nature and invites the 
reader in to remember with him, 
his mother and his younger self. 

“I am writing because they told 

me to never start a sentence with 
because,” Vuong writes, “But I 
wasn’t trying to make a sentence 
— I was trying to break free.” 

“On Earth” is cen-
tered around the 
confusion of this 
search 
for 
free-

dom, revealing the 
interplay between 
the 
“why”s 
and 

“because”s of a dif-
ficult life. He can’t 
start 
a 
sentence 

with 
“because,” 

but Vuong is a mas-
ter of explanation; 
even if it isn’t in 
the way a reader 
expects. 

Though 
Little 

Dog is not exactly Vuong, or vice 
versa, the intimacy between the 
author and character is palpable. 
It’s almost like Vuong is trying to 
describe how his reflection looks 
in a foxed mirror; there are some 
parts of Little Dog that are the 
author completely, but the others 
are somewhere in the middle of 
them both.

It’s this foggy quality of mem-

ory that colors the entirety of “On 
Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” 
almost like a character of its own. 
Of course, it affects Little Dog’s 
memories of his mother, but also 
her own recollections of her life 
and those of her mother, too. In a 
narrative heavy with their family’s 
story of immigration from Viet-
nam, this emphasis on memory is 
also tied to Little Dog’s relation-
ship with a heritage fraught with 
trauma. 

‘On Earth’ tells a 
tale of becoming

CLARA SCOTT 
Senior Arts Editor

On Earth We’re 

Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong

Jonathan Cape

June 4, 2019

BOOK REVIEW

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