There’s something uncanny in the way that Never Too Late, the documentary that explores Elton John’s life and career on his farewell tour, is structured. If you were to look at the events in Elton’s life that are put under the microscope by directors R. J. Cutler and David Furnish (Elton John’s husband and manager) — a combative relationship with his father, struggles with substance abuse, and a genuinely triumphant moment at which his career comes full circle back at Dodgers Stadium — it would feel, at least at a glance, more like a biopic in the Bohemian Rhapsody mold than a documentary. Maybe that’s just splitting semantic hairs, and there’s just a lot of shared DNA between documentaries and biopics. But for something like Never Too Late, which wants to chart something specific, in what the “Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour” has to say about the man, the music, and the times in which it all happened, and has seemingly intimate access to the eponymous pop star, the film is always in danger of being less than the sum of its parts. Alongside the traditional documentary trappings of performance footage, archival material, and candid conversations with the man himself, Never Too Late also changes form in certain moments, often the ones seen as the most pivotal in Elton’s life — his discovery of, and love for pop music and a near-fatal overdose, with these two in particular acting as potential sites of birth and death for Elton as a pop star — and while the animation is fluid and surprising, their place in the film always feels a little off, as if they were added in an attempt to make Never Too Late not seem like just another documentary, just another music biopic.
Elton John himself in this documentary might be the most surprising thing about it. There’s always a temptation to think about what appears on stage — the frantic hammering of piano keys, the outrageous outfits, the gloriously maximalist spectacle — as being some kind of extension of the performer when they step off stage and return to the real world. But Elton makes clear that this has never been the case for him; when discussing his childhood and musical origins, he confesses, with a laugh, that he was “everything a rock and roll star shouldn’t be.” In fact, it’s these moments that are either offstage, or one step removed from the lurid tales of rock stardom, that end up being the most revealing about Elton. In planning for an episode of his Rocket Hour radio show, and practicing the lines with which he’ll introduce a queer country singer that he’ll be interviewing, Elton reveals, offhand: “I don’t like that word.” And sure enough, when it comes time to introduce his guest, he uses the word “LGBTQ” instead of “queer.” It seems that the politics of queerness, then or now, aren’t of interest to this documentary. But there are revealing, tender, and urgent moments to be found in the ways that Elton talks about his past relationships, and also coming out via a Rolling Stone interview. It’s here that he mentions the “heterosexual posture” that pop stardom had contorted him into, out of fear that to show anything less than that would be detrimental to his career. Although one can’t help but wonder if, once Elton had come out — his career full of glorious, camp showmanship, and his most famous album a reference to The Wizard of Oz — people looked at it in the same way Rob Halford of Judas Priest expected fans to when he came out: by asking how this all was ever straight to begin with.
The greatest irony in Never Too Late is that, for a life-and-career spanning documentary, it’s most compelling when it, and Elton, are gazing off into uncharted waters. “I love people who think about tomorrow,” he says at one point. And if anything, it’s this thinking about tomorrow that seems to animate not only the farewell tour, but anything that lies beyond it. The performer is very candid about why he’s leaning the road behind; not just for how all-consuming the act of touring is, but through an awareness of mortality, wanting to spend as much time as possible with his young children. There’s a scene where Elton is in a recording studio, working on a remix of “Tiny Dancer,” when he video calls his kids. They talk about the minutiae of childhood and parenting: school plays, behavior, missing one another, and the simplicity and clarity with which this moment is presented suddenly makes clear the kind of film Never Too Late could be if it wasn’t also so committed to telling the story of Elton’s life story in less than two hours.
Because throughout Never Too Late, there are moments of Elton either looking on to what comes next, or grappling with his past in a material way. Of course, some of this comes from his return to Dodgers Stadium — his 1975 performances there acting as what we might now call a “cultural reset” — bringing his family on stage for the final curtain call, saying goodbye to a life more complex than a documentary can contain. But more than that, he returns to some of the first clubs he played in the U.S. (American audiences and critics took to him more readily than those in his native UK), saying: “Everything in the past looks bigger in your memory.” One can’t help but wonder if this statement rings true for Elton as he considers his life writ large. Especially since it’s in these small moments that Never Too Late is not only at its most interesting, but most unexpected. There’s something else in this film, trapped beneath layers of genre convention and familiar beats. If only it could make its way out, Never Too Late might be able to be its most authentic self, a look at how saying goodbye to one thing means greeting another with open arms.
DIRECTOR: R.J. Cutler & David Furnish; DISTRIBUTOR: Disney+; IN THEATERS: November 15; STREAMING: December 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
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