CANNES: Bono, Elton John, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits... The red carpet at Cannes is shaping up to look like a dream rock festival line-up.

Not to mention Rihanna and a couple of the surviving members of Led Zeppelin, who may yet put in an appearance at the world’s biggest film festival, which starts on Tuesday.

The opening movie alone, the tongue-in-cheek zombie flick “The Dead Don’t Die”, is chock full of A-lister musicians.

As well as Waits and Iggy Pop — who plays a rampaging member of the undead — it also stars singer Selena Gomez and rapper and Wu-Tang Clan guru RZA.

Its director Jim Jarmusch is a composer in his spare time and leads Bill Murray and Adam Driver are both musical, with the “Groundhog Day” actor touring North America as a singer with a chamber orchestra in 2017.

And that is all before the promise of Elton John bringing his grand piano to the Croisette to play at the premiere of his biopic, “Rocketman”.

With “Bohemian Rhapsody” taking more than $900 million at the box office, cinema bosses are wetting their lips over the amount a film about the sex and drug-fuelled life story of the writer of such standards as “I’m Still Standing” will rake in.

Unlike that the Freddie Mercury movie, which skirted around the singer’s complex personal life, the Elton John picture prides itself on its warts-and-all portrayal.

The singer — who has been frank about his struggles with his sexuality, drugs and alcohol — was himself deeply involved in the film, which his husband David Furnish produced.

“We didn’t want to compromise the fact we felt it had to be hard-hitting and truthful,” Furnish said.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2019