Pretty much every moviegoer is aware by now that the Dexter Fletcher-directed movie (he was brought in to complete and save Bohemian Rhapsody when director Bryan Singer went MIA) is an R-rated, warts-and-all musical whirligig about the life of Reginald Dwight, the achingly shy, affection-starved young musical prodigy from Middlesex whom the world now knows as Elton John. Saddled with nearly crippling self-loathing and irredeemably awful parents (played with hiss-worthy viciousness by Bryce Dallas Howard and icy indifference by Steven Mackintosh), we see young Reggie slowly and painfully learn to smother his insecurities and thinning hair in bejeweled devil hats, tiaras, flamboyant baseball outfits, comically wild goggles and bravado.

Then, as he hits the pinnacle of worldwide rock stardom as Elton Hercules John, still the same achingly shy and love-starved adult he was as a kid, he hurls headlong into a long nightmare of addictive booze, shopping, spending, drugs, bulimia, explosive anger and sex. Sure, this being a pop-star bio movie, it drags with it those all-too-familiar tropes and clichés. They go with the territory. But that’s because many pop stars' lives have created those tropes and clichés, and movies don’t tend to get made about untroubled souls.

Elton John himself is a singular talent and diva who, with his husband David Furnish, has been pushing for this movie for years and absolutely refused—unlike the surviving founders of Queen, who insisted on scrubbing much of the gay away from Freddie Mercury—to have his strangeness and his gayness neither stifled nor homogenized by a standard biopic. So it’s when screenwriter Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and director Fletcher are most out of their heads that the movie blasts into the weird and wonderful: a musical sequence imagined as a suicide attempt that turns into an underwater duet with his younger self on “Daniel”; a club date that floats both the singer and the audience skyward in rock and roll bliss; a party at Mama Cass Elliot’s house that not only turns into a trippy, dreamlike evocation of an entire time and place but also the beginnings of a troubled love story, and the inciting event for “Tiny Dancer"; and a full-on bump-and-grind orgy that bleeds into something out of Hieronymus Bosch.

The movie aspires to be something more along the lines of All That Jazz, Across the Universe and Tommy rather than Bohemian Rhapsody. And those aspirations are wrapped around Taron Egerton’s astonishing, touching, charismatic, stylized and career-redefining performance. He sings really well, sometimes sounding very like John himself, but he’s even better at conjuring the singer’s essence; as Elton John, he’s charming, preening, monstrous, insufferable. As he confesses to his rehab support group, “I started being a cunt in 1975, and I forgot to stop.” But when he aches—man, do you ache for him.

For those of us who mostly know Egerton as Eggsy from the Kingsman movies, let’s just say that he's so bloody good, he’s going to shush the hell out of entire audiences of doubters and—who knows?—probably be in play when awards season rolls around. Egerton is beautifully matched by a soulful, sympathetic, sweet Jamie Bell, who plays Elton John’s songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin.

In a film in which too much is never enough, a simple, stunning scene featuring Egerton as a gay man singing his new lyrics to “Your Song” to composer Bell, playing a straight man, stops the show with the beauty of the song and the power of the emotional undercurrents flowing between the two lifelong platonic friends. And when Taupin has had enough of John and wants out of the rock world, they duet memorably on “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” and Bell’s Taupin sings, “I should have stayed on the farm,” which is exactly where he’s going.

Some persnickety types may get their noses get out of joint because of the liberties and dramatic license taken by Fletcher and Hall. For example, unlike the way the movie dramatizes, “Crocodile Rock” had yet to be written and yet Egerton sings the hell out of it on the night John made a legendary U.S. debut at the Troubadour, the Santa Monica Blvd. institution run by the eccentric, pure-Hollywood creation that was club owner Doug Weston (Tate Donovan plays him, and he’s a blast).

Homophobes might get their tighty-whities in a twist over scenes like the ones involving John’s sexually charged and ultimately explosive relationship with his future manager John Reid (sinisterly sexy, charismatic Richard Madden from Bodyguard). The two get to play the first man-on-man sex scene in Hollywood-movie history, and the moment, even cut from its original length, still emerges as hot and passionate but utterly natural and inevitable.

Besides, as John tells his mother in the movie, “I have fucked everything that moves,” so deal with that, those who’d prefer that the movie straightwashed him the way Bohemian Rhapsody straightwashed Freddie Mercury. Rocketman has so much in the way of drive, charm, wit, unflinching honesty, flash and talent that, much like the movie’s subject, it mows down our resistance and makes us overlook its shortcomings.