Well, rockets are staged. If you only recover the first stage, that's still a big savings. As it happens, the first stage on a space rocket doesn't need to climb very high and doesn't need to move downrange very far; it just has to lift a lot of weight. Having it come back down afterwards is still a huge control problem, but not impossible in terms of physics. You're not that far downrange and have (relatively) little lateral movement to compensate.

A second or third stage could be more tricky, of course.