For Fans of Elton John

Most music biopics chase accuracy. Rocketman (2019) chases feeling, which is the correct choice for a subject whose entire career is about emotional amplification. The decision to stage key memories as musical numbers rather than recreations gives the film permission to be as excessive as its subject. It is not a documentary. It is the internal autobiography of a man who turned his pain into platinum. That Taron Egerton does the singing himself, and commits to it, is not a minor thing. It is the whole film.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road gets the credit and deserves it. But Tumbleweed Connection, released in 1970, is the album where you hear the core of what Elton John and Bernie Taupin actually were: two English boys besotted with an America they had never visited, writing country-gothic stories about outlaws, soldiers, and travelling preachers. It sounds like a country album filtered through British Invasion ears, and it has aged better than almost anything from that era. The sequencing is immaculate. Start with Ballad of a Well-Known Gun and go straight through.

Cameron Crowe's 2000 film is set squarely in the early-1970s rock world that Elton John was conquering in real time. The film understands what made that world feel genuinely important: the belief that the music was changing something. William Miller boarding a plane with a band that sounds exactly like the kind of band Elton was outselling is one of the great pieces of period atmosphere in American cinema. If you love the emotional peak of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Madman Across the Water, Almost Famous is the film that explains why those records felt like they mattered beyond just sounding good.