Elton John: Never Too Late hits Disney+ after its premiere last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, and after the singer, songwriter, and pianist put the wraps on 50 years of live performance with Farewell Yellow Brick Road, his nine leg, 330-date goodbye tour. (The years-long jaunt joins Taylor Swift’s Eras as one of the biggest-selling live events in all of recorded history.) Directed by RJ Cutler (Martha) and David Furnish, Elton John’s husband, and based around John’s conversations with journalist Alexis Petridis for the 2019 autobiography Me, Never Too Late strikes a confessional tone as the singer considers how he came to define himself through his career. “There was an emptiness within me,” John says in Never Too Late. “I desperately didn’t want to be the Elton that I’d become.”
The Gist: Between 1970 and 1975, Elton John and his band put out eight full-length studio recordings, albums that featured durable classics like “Your Song,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Levon,” “Bennie and the Jets,” and the original “Candle in the Wind.” (What a run! Today’s prestige TV could never, with its years-long gaps between 8-episode seasons.) The singer and piano player had gone from selling out the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1970 – capacity 300 – to playing a sold-out three-night stand at Dodger Stadium in 1975, where hundreds of thousands of fans thrilled to his bejeweled, Bob Mackie-designed Dodger uniform. But inside all of that success and glam, where was the man born Reginald “Reg” Dwight in 1947 in Pinner, Middlesex, England? In a 2022 interview for Never Too Late, John says that once he found his dreams of “making it” had been fulfilled, he had nothing to replace them with. Well, besides booze, cocaine, and empty sex.
John’s farewell tour figures heavily into Never Too Late, as it follows him on the road in the months before a new round of shows at Dodger Stadium. (Those celebratory 2022 shows became a Disney+ concert special.) Guided by audio recordings of Petridis’ interviews with John, the doc also dips into the singer’s childhood, where he grew up in an abusive home with checked-out parents, his musical influences – check out the incredible footage of Winifred Atwell playing boogie-woogie piano on British television in 1954 – and his earliest stabs at performance. Over color stills of his grinning, pint-sized self playing covers in Pinner pubs with a microphone and a Farfisa, John says that is where Elton officially replaced Reg for good.
Never Too Late doesn’t feature any supporting interviews, or the usual round of celebrity testimonials that a doc about a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer would include. (In contrast, there is lots of that in the adjacent Dodger Stadium concert special.) It’s more of a confessional than a traditional music doc, as John reflects on a life and career in twilight. He is an older man after all, with his share of health issues, with a younger spouse and two very young children. But he’s also able to consider the journey with some humor, some regret, and a fair amount of insight. His passionate but destructive relationship with John Reid, his lover and manager – Reid, who was played by Richard Madden and Aidan Gillen across two recent biopics – and his eventual decision to both come out publicly and get sober – these are part of what formed him, what finally made him whole. “It took me years and years to be honest.” It’s never too late to look in the mirror.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Even if it was a hit on its own, and it remains the better film, it still feels like Rocketman, the 2019 Elton John biopic starring an all-in Taron Egerton, got a bit of its thunder stolen by Bohemian Rhapsody. And in terms of looking back as a career comes to a close, the 2023 documentary I Am A Noise remains a powerful testament to creativity and personal inspiration as it profiles the life, work, and activism of singer-songwriter Joan Baez.
Performance Worth Watching: Never Too Late forgoes cutaway interviews, so we never hear from them personally. But the longevity of Elton John’s band is commendable. Guys like drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Davey Johnstone, who John has played and performed with for decades, and who feel just as integral to his work and career as John’s longtime partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin.
Memorable Dialogue: “Then my debauchery came.” Perhaps it’s because he’s a performer, or because he’s spoken about this stuff at length. But the manner in which Elton John shares his most confessional moments feels both revelatory and like a self-inflicted spill of the tea. “All I lived for was my chart position, sex, and cocaine.”
Sex and Skin: A better way to put this is flamboyance, a force John harnessed through custom costumed stagewear to be the most furious-possible version of himself. This guy has a long, proud history of spelling out his name in sequins on the backs of blouses, jackets and jerseys, and Never Too Late reveals the receipts.
Our Take: It’s almost intimate, how we overhear Elton John’s talk with journalist Alexis Petridis throughout Never Too Late. Those conversations are never on camera, so a sense of closeness emerges as they’re featured over archival performance footage, selections from John’s private writings and diaries, and the doc’s general 1970s-to-the-2020s pendulum. It’s Elton John himself, not an external narrator, who lends personal context to each clip. And it’s John who often admits how he was really feeling in those moments, even as the footage depicts a successful musician working at the top of his game, leading thousands of fans in song, and enjoying the trappings of that pop star life. John says that after it all, it was never what he wanted or needed to truly be happy. And so he’d retreat into a room, just like he had as a child ignored by his parents, only this time it was a hotel suite and a three-day drug bender.
Never Too Late is also good at aligning these emotional notes with contemporary stuff where Elton John is on camera, as he is either preparing for or playing his Farewell Yellow Brick Road shows. He is content. He is curious. (Talking with a young band for his podcast, John notes that he’s 64 years older than their drummer.) And he’s happy with how it all turned out, even if he always struggled to balance his personal demons against professional success. “I took Winifred Atwell’s bonhomie, I took Little Richard’s aggression, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s outrageousness in my style of playing, forging myself into being a personality like nobody else.” But beyond what he brought to the stage, it’s what we hear in his own words that informs the most lasting moments in Elton John: Never Too Late.
Our Call: Stream It. Never Too Late is a kind of documentary companion to Elton John’s Live at Dodger Stadium concert special. They represent the musician’s professional farewell after 50 years of making records, playing shows, and seeking personal contentment, and before his own candle in the wind burns out.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.