OSCARS 2025: Elton John: Never Too Late (2024)

When I was a really young kid, I went through a time when getting to sleep was a struggle. It's not that I wasn't ready for bed time. I was afraid to go to sleep because I thought monsters were going to eat me. That's a whole other story. Anyway, one of the few things that would calm me down, weirdly enough, was putting on Elton John's “Greatest Hits.” “Your Song” I found especially relaxing. All of this is to say that, yes, I do have some affection for Sir Elton's music. I don't consider him one of the great pop stars or anything. That run from “Honky Chateau” to “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” is fairly unimpeachable though. Outside of “The Lion King” soundtrack, John's output hasn't caught my attention much in the last three decades. (I did think “This Train Don't Stop There Anymore” was a good song though.) He's clearly still a big enough of a touring act that, when he announced that he was retiring from performing, it received quite a bit of attention... Including a new documentary about his life, tracking the occasion. “Elton John: Never Too Late” probably wouldn't have been much more than a blip in the man's career but it did snag an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, proving that the Academy clearly still loves the old queen. 

In 2018, John would kick-off his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour, promised to be his final time performing his music for a live audience. Directors R.J. Cutler – previously behind documentaries about Billie Ellish, John Belushi, and Martha Stewart – construct the film around John returning to Dodgers Stadium, where he previously performed a pair of sold-out concerts in 1975. (The film is also co-credited to David Furnish, John's husband who previously made a film about him in 1997.) The doc leaps back and forth in time between John preparing in the modern day for this farewell tour and his life in the seventies, during the peak of his fame, as recounted through a series of archive interviews recorded during the writing of his memoir. 

The 2019 release of “Rocketman,” the biopic about John's life, led to a revival of interest in his music. I imagine his farewell tour becoming the third highest grossing tour of all time probably has something to do with that. That film covered the musician's early life, rise to fame, his days of excessive drugs and wild partying in the seventies, his mental and emotional burn-out, and his quest to get clean. Despite that movie being well received and successful, “Never Too Late” strangely covers more-or-less the same period. He discusses how he became interested in playing piano, his difficult childhood and strained relationship with his parents, and how his loneliness led to a dependency on drugs and alcohol. “Never Too Late” concludes basically with John's suicide attempt, in which he overdoses on pills and dives into a pool, a dramatic moment that was also covered in “Rocketman.” 

Obviously, the main difference between this film and “Rocketman” is that John himself is recounting this time in his life in his own words. The doc clearly had an unlimited access to archival footage, everything from childhood pictures to grainy vintage interviews being shown. For moments in John's life not documented, the film recreates them with brief animated interludes. And some of these anecdotes are interesting. Such as when John describes confessing his platonic love to songwriting partner Bernie Taupin. Or, amusingly, tells of a time he and John Lennon were consuming a mountain of cocaine and attempting to hide from Andy Warhol. These more personal stories are definitely worth hearing, even if “Never Too Late” slips them in-between the standard rock doc arc of a rise, a drug-induced fall, and an inevitable rise again.

The device of jumping between the two time periods reveals a big weakness about “Never Too Late.” The scenes we get of John in the modern day are far more perfunctory. We see him being made up for the performance, video-chatting with his two sons, or putzing around the studio with producers that are considerably younger than him. While it's sweet to watch him chitchat with his children or goof around back stage, these moments give us very little insight into the man's creative process or personal life. After a while, it becomes clear why “Never Too Late” is structured the way it is: A documentary about John's final tour was the original idea but, well, the footage gathered wasn't very interesting. Meanwhile, the story of his drug-induced depravity and mental health struggles in the seventies have already powered one successful movie. 

In its final third, “Never Too Late” mostly puts the archive footage away and shows clips of the man performing during the Dodgers Stadium show. He might be a doddering old man now but the guy can clearly still sing and play. In these late scenes, “Never Too Late” becomes a half-assed concert film of sorts. Once again, you feel this editorial schism in the movie. Is this a documentary about John's career overall, his final tour, or simply a capture of him singing during this one performance? The documentary never quite seems to decide on one approach over another, attempting to fill the remaining spaces with the animated sequences or classic performance footage. 

The result is a film that's unlikely to tell hardcore fans of John anything they didn't already know. Casual listeners also aren't given too much new to chew on, aside from a handful of amusing words from the man himself. There's not too much to it, in other words, though it's not the worst way to pass 102 minute. As for the nominated song, it only plays over the end credits and is a passable enough ballad. But it probably says a lot about “Never Too Late” that I learned more about Elton John scanning through his Wikipedia article than I did this movie. Did you know he wrote the music for a Broadway musical based on Anne Rice's “Lestat the Vampire?” Or a more recent musical about Tammy Faye Bakker? Both are apparently pretty lame but morbid curiosity is getting to me, I'll admit... [6/10]