baz luhrmann elvis movie review

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The standard rock biopic formula gets all shook up in Elvis , with Baz Luhrmann's dazzling energy and style perfectly complemented by Austin Butler's outstanding lead performance.

Like the man himself, Elvis delivers dazzling, crowd-pleasing entertainment that provokes a wide range of emotions.

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Baz Luhrmann

Austin Butler

Elvis Presley

Colonel Tom Parker

Helen Thomson

Richard Roxburgh

Vernon Presley

Olivia DeJonge

Priscilla Presley

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“Elvis” brings all of the glitz, rhinestones, and jumpsuits you’d expect in an Elvis film, but without the necessary complexity for a movie from 2022 about the “King.”

Maximalist filmmaker Baz Luhrmann , who abhors visual restraint and instead opts for grand theatricality, should be the perfect creator for a Presley biopic, but isn’t. Luhrmann tells us this icon’s story from the perspective of the singer’s longtime, crooked manager Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ). After collapsing in his tacky, memorabilia-filled office, a near-death Parker awakens alone in a Las Vegas hospital room. The papers have labeled him a crook, a cheat who took advantage of Elvis ( Austin Butler ), so he must set the record straight. 

From the jump, Luhrmann’s aesthetic language takes hold: An IV-drip turns into the Las Vegas skyline; in a hospital nightgown, Parker walks through a casino until he arrives at a roulette wheel. Carrying a heap of affectations, Hanks plays Parker like the Mouse King in “ The Nutcracker .” For precisely the film’s first half hour, “Elvis” moves like a Christmas fairytale turned nightmare; one fueled not by jealousy but the pernicious clutches of capitalism and racism, and the potent mixture they create. 

It’s difficult to wholly explain why “Elvis” doesn’t work, especially because for long stretches it offers rushes of enthralling entertainment. In the early goings-on, Luhrmann and co-writers Sam Bromell , Craig Pearce , and Jeremy Doner meticulously build around Presley’s influences. They explain how Gospel and Blues equally enraptured him—a well-edited, both visually and sonically, sequence mixes the two genres through a sweaty performance of “That’s Alright Mama”—and they also show how much his time visiting on Beale Street informed his style and sound. A performance of “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton ( Shonka Dukureh ), and the emergence of a flashy B.B. King ( Kelvin Harrison Jr.) furthers the point. Presley loves the superhero Shazam, and dreams about reaching the Rock of Eternity, a stand-in for stardom in this case. He’s also a momma’s boy (thankfully Luhrmann doesn’t belabor the death of Elvis’ brother, a biographical fact lampooned by “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”).  

Though a biopic veteran, Hanks has rarely been a transformative actor. In this case, you can hear his accent slipping back toward Hanks. And the heavy prosthetics do him few favors, robbing him of his facial range—an underrated tool in his repertoire. And Hanks already struggles to play outright villains; shaping the story from his perspective takes the edge off of his potential menace. It’s a tough line for Hanks to walk, to be unsuspecting yet vicious. Hanks creates a friction that doesn’t altogether work, but feels at home in Luhrmann’s heavy reliance on artifice. 

The most fascinating linkage in “Elvis” is the extrapolation of commerce and race. Parker is enamored by Presley because he plays Black music but is white. Elvis turns off the white Christian old, like the moribund country singer Hank Snow ( David Wenham ), and the homophobic men who consider him a “fairy.” Yet he excites the young, like Jimmie Rogers ( Kodi Smit-McPhee , both actors provide fantastic comic relief), and he has sex appeal. A wiggle, if you please. Luhrmann takes that wiggle seriously, showing sexually possessed, screaming women. Butler’s crotch, in precisely fitted pink pants and shot in close-up, vibrates. Harsh zooms, quick whip pans, and a taste for horniness (by both men and women) help make the early moments of this biopic so special. As does its anti-capitalist bent, which depicts how often labor, art, and ownership can be spit out and garbled in the destructive system.    

Unfortunately, “Elvis” soon slips into staid biopic territory. We see the meteoric rise of Presley, the mistakes—whether by greed or naïveté—he makes along the way, and his ultimate descent toward self-parody. His mother ( Helen Thomson ) dies on the most hackneyed of beats. His father ( Richard Roxburgh ) quivers in the shallowest of ways. Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ) appears and is handed standard tragic wife material. The pacing slows, and the story just doesn’t offer enough playfulness or interiority to keep up. 

But even so, the latter portions of Luhrmann’s film aren’t without its pleasures: The performance of “Trouble,” whereby Presley defies the Southern racists who fear his Black-infused music (and sensuality) will infiltrate white America, is arresting. Cinematographer Mandy Walker ’s freeze frames imitate black and white photography, like wrapping history in the morning dew. The performance of Elvis’ comeback special, specifically his rendition of “If I Can Dream” soars. During the Vegas sequences, the costumes become ever more elaborate, the make-up ever more garish, acutely demonstrating Presley’s physical decline. And Butler, an unlikely Elvis, tightly grips the reins by providing one show-stopping note after another. There isn’t a hint of fakery in anything Butler does. That sincerity uplifts “Elvis” even as it tumbles.    

But all too often the film slips into a great white hope syndrome, whereby Presley is the sincere white hero unearthing the exotic and sensual Black artists of his era. B.B. King, Big Momma Thornton, and Little Richard (real-life supporters of Presley) exist solely as either bulletin board cheerleaders or alluring beings from a far-off land. While these Black artists are championed—an awareness by Luhrmann of their importance and the long and winding history of Black art moving through white spaces—they barely speak or retain any depth, even while a paternalistic Presley advances their cause. 

The approach neither illuminates nor dignifies these figures. Instead, Luhrmann tries to smooth over the complicated feelings many Black folks of varied generations have toward the purported King. In that smoothing, Presley loses enough danger, enough fascinating complications to render the whole enterprise predictable. Because it’s not enough to merely have awareness, a filmmaker also has a responsibility to question whether they’re the right person to tell a story. Luhrmann isn’t. And that’s a failing that will be difficult for many viewers to ignore.

Luhrmann side-steps other parts of the Elvis mythology, including the age gap between Priscilla and Presley (the pair met in Germany when the former was 14 years old), and when Elvis became a stooge for Richard Nixon . Excluding the latter makes little sense in a movie concerning the commodification of Presley by capitalism and conservatism. Luhrmann wants to show the downfall of a doe-eyed icon by nefarious systems, but never pushes the envelope enough for him to become unlikable, or better yet, intricate and human. 

That flattening easily arises from telling this story from Colonel Parker’s perspective. He doesn’t care about Black people, therefore, they exist as cardboard cutouts. He cares little for Priscilla, therefore, she has little personhood. And Parker certainly isn’t going to tarnish the image or brand of Elvis because it corrodes himself. These undesirable outcomes, facile and pointless, make logical sense considering the framing of the narrative. But what good is making a sanitized Elvis biopic in 2022? And truly, who really needs a further fortification of Presley’s cultural importance when it’s been the dominant strain for over 60 years? It’s another noxious draft in history clumsily written by white hands.

“Elvis” certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions. Luhrmann always puts Butler in the best position to succeed until the credits, whereby he cuts to archival footage of Presley singing “Unchained Melody.” In that moment Luhrmann reminds you of the myth-making at play. Which is maybe a good thing, given Luhrmann’s misleading, plasticine approach. 

Now playing in theaters.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

• Austin Butler as Elvis Presley
• Dacre Montgomery as Steve Binder
• Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker
• Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley
• Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King
• Richard Roxburgh as Vernon Presley
• Helen Thomson as Gladys Presley
• Yola as Sister Rosetta Tharpe
• David Wenham as Hank Snow
• Luke Bracey as Jerry Schilling
• Alex Radu as George Klein
• Alton Mason as Little Richard
• Xavier Samuel as Scotty Moore
• Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jimmie Rodgers Snow
• Natasha Bassett as Dixie Locke
• Leon Ford as Tom Diskin
• Baz Luhrmann

Writer (story by)

• Jeremy Doner
• Craig Pearce
• Sam Bromell
• Elliott Wheeler
• Jonathan Redmond

Cinematographer

• Mandy Walker

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‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life

Austin Butler plays the singer, with Tom Hanks as his devilish manager, in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic.

By A.O. Scott

My first and strongest memory of Elvis Presley is of his death. He was only 42 but he already seemed, in 1977, to belong to a much older world. In the 45 years since, his celebrity has become almost entirely necrological. Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum.

Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. Luhrmann, whose relationship to the past has always been irreverent and anti-nostalgic, wants to shock Elvis back to life, to imagine who he was in his own time and what he might mean in ours.

The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist with jolts of hip-hop (extended into a suite over the final credits), slivers of techno and slatherings of synthetic film-score schmaltz. (The composer and executive music producer is Elliott Wheeler.) The sonic message — and the film’s strongest argument for its subject’s relevance — is that Presley’s blend of blues, gospel, pop and country continues to mutate and pollinate in the musical present. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.

As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Its rendering of a quintessentially American tale of race, sex, religion and money teeters between glib revisionism and zombie mythology, unsure if it wants to be a lavish pop fable or a tragic melodrama.

The ghoulish, garish production design, by Catherine Martin (Luhrmann’s wife and longtime creative partner) and Karen Murphy, is full of carnival sleaze and Vegas vulgarity. All that satin and rhinestone, filtered through Mandy Walker’s pulpy, red-dominated cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of lurid, frenzied eroticism. You might mistake this for a vampire movie.

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• Entertainment
• Baz Luhrmann’s <i>Elvis</i> Is an Exhilarating, Maddening Spectacle—But One Made With Love

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Is an Exhilarating, Maddening Spectacle—But One Made With Love

B az Luhrmann’s movies—even the great ones, like his 1996 Shakespeare-via- Tiger Beat romance Romeo + Juliet , or The Great Gatsby, from 2013, a fringed shimmy of decadence and loneliness—are loathed by many for what they see as the director’s garishness, his adoration of spectacle, his penchant for headache-inducing, mincemeat-and-glitter editing. But in 2022, in a culture where long-form series storytelling reigns supreme, Luhrmann’s devotion to two-and-a-half-hour bursts of excess is pleasingly old-fashioned, like a confetti blast from a cannon at a county fair. It’s true that his movies don’t always work, or rarely work all the way though, and that’s certainly the case with Elvis, his sequined jumpsuit of a biopic playing out of competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival . At times it’s barely a movie—the first hour or so is exceptionally fragmented and frenetic, as if Luhrmann were time-traveling through a holographic rendering of Elvis Presley’s life, dipping and darting through the significant events with little time to touch down. But through all the arty overindulgences, one truth shines through: Luhrmann loves Elvis so much it hurts. And in a world where there’s always, supposedly, a constant stream of new things to love, or at least to binge-watch, love of Elvis—our American pauper king with a cloth-of-gold voice—feels like a truly pure thing.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis. Though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—his identical twin, Jesse Garon, died at birth— Elvis grew up poor in Memphis, adoring and being adored by his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Luhrmann shows us Elvis as a preadolescent, splitting his time between a juke joint and a revival tent down the road. (Too young to get into the former, he could only peer through a crack in the wall, entranced by the Black blues guys performing inside.) These are the twin poles of young Elvis’ life, the foundation for all that came after, and Luhrmann connects them in one extremely stylized shot: in Elvis world, gospel and blues are literally connected by one dirt road. This junior version of Elvis goes back and forth freely, drinking deeply from one well before moving to the other, and back again.

His rise happens quickly, and before you know it, he’s become the Elvis we know, or the one we think we know: he’s played by Austin Butler, who goes beyond merely replicating Elvis’ signature moves (though he’s terrific at that); he seems to be striving to conjure some phantasmal fingerprint. For long stretches of the movie, Butler’s Elvis doesn’t really have many lines: we see him, in his pre-fame years, jumping out of the truck he drives for a living and walking down a Memphis street, swinging a guitar in one hand a lunchbox in the other. Did the real-life Elvis actually do this? Doubtful. But isn’t it exactly what you want to see in a movie?

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Before long, our movie Elvis has landed a slot performing on the Louisiana Hayride, and Sam Phillips over at Sun Studios—who specializes in “race records,” music made by Black performers—takes a chance on him at the behest of his assistant, Marion Keisker, who hears something in the kid. Elvis cuts a record. Then he’s jiggling onstage in a loose pink suit, its supple fabric hiding more than it reveals, but even so, the world gets a hint at the secrets contained therein. The girls, and most of the boys, too, go nuts.

Butler conjures the guilelessness of Elvis’ face, his soft yet chiseled cheekbones, the look in his eyes that says, “I’m up for anything—are you?” He and Luhrmann hop through the major events of Presley’s life, sometimes going for long stretches without taking a breath. Elvis is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from. (Catherine Martin’s costume and production design is, as always, exemplary—period-perfect but also brushed with imaginative flourishes.) We see Elvis shopping at his beloved Lansky Brothers, lured in because one of his favorite musicians, B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) shops there. We see him succumbing to the dangerous manipulations of Colonel Parker, and later kicking against them, most notably as he mounts his 1968 comeback special. (He was supposed to put on a garish Christmas sweater and sing some piece of holiday dreck, not become the stuff of legend in a black leather suit that, you just know, would be hot to the touch if only you could get close enough to it.)

But as we know, Elvis loses that fight. Colonel Parker sends a quack known as Dr. Nick to pump him full of drugs, to keep him on his feet even as he’s going out of his mind. The tragedy escalates. Does Luhrmann show us the real Elvis, or is he just re-embroidering the Elvis who already lives in our imagination? The answer seems to be that Luhrmann sees equal value in fact and myth. Though Elvis more or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing. When Elvis’ long-suffering wife Priscilla (played by Olivia DeJonge ) finally leaves him, he chases after her, rushing down the staircase at Graceland in pants and a purple robe, a drugged-out mess. She can’t take it anymore; she’s got to leave, and she’s taking little Lisa Marie with her. Elvis stands there in bare feet, begging her not to go. And when he realizes he can’t stop her, he says, more in defeat than in hopefulness, “When you’re 40 and I’m 50, we’ll be back together—you’ll see.” Even if Elvis never really uttered that line, its map of romantic longing had long been written in his voice. In Elvis, when Butler sings, it’s Elvis’ voice that streams out, in lustrous ribbons of recklessness, of ardor, of hope for the future. That voice is a repository of every joy and misery that life could possibly hold.

Read More: He’ll Always Be Elvis: Remembering the ‘King’ 40 Years On

When the trailer for Elvis was released, a few months back, the responses on social media, and among people I know, ranged from “That looks unhinged! I’m dying to see it!” to “I can’t even look at that thing,” to “What accent, exactly, is Tom Hanks trying to achieve?” (The movie, incidentally, explains the unidentifiable diction of this man without a country, and probably without a soul.) In the movie’s last moments, Luhrmann recreates one of the saddest Elvis remnants, a live performance of “Unchained Melody” from June of 1977, just two months before his death. Butler, his face puffed out with prosthetics, sits at a grand piano littered with Coca Cola cups and a discarded terrycloth towel or two. The song, a swallow’s swoop of longing, begins pouring out of Elvis’s wrecked body—but as we watch, Luhrmann pulls a mystical switch, and footage of the real Elvis replaces the magnificent Butler-as-Elvis doppelgänger we’ve been watching. For a few confusing moments, the real Elvis is no longer a ghost—he has returned to us, an actor playing himself, and we see that as good as that Butler kid was, there’s no comparison to the real thing.

But the feeling of relief is fleeting. Elvis , now gone for more than 40 years, is a ghost, no matter how passionately Luhrmann and Butler have tried to reconstitute his ectoplasm. The only consolation is that when a person is no longer a person, he is at last free to become a dream. In the final moments of Elvis, Luhrmann returns his beloved subject to that world, like a fisherman freeing his catch. “Lonely rivers flow/to the sea, to the sea,” the song tells us, as the true Elvis swims back to his home of safety—he’s better off as a dream, maybe, safe from everyone who might hurt or use him. But for a few hours there, he seemed to walk among us once again, a sighting that no one would believe if we tried to tell them. But we saw him. We really did. And then he slipped away, having had enough of our claim over him, if never enough of our love.

Correction, July 5

The original version of this story misstated the film’s screenwriters; Jeremy Doner was omitted.

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Austin butler and tom hanks in baz luhrmann’s ‘elvis’: film review | cannes 2022.

The King of Rock and Roll gets suitably electrified biopic treatment in this kinetic vision of his life and career through the eyes of the financial abuser who controlled him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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How you feel about Baz Luhrmann ’s Elvis will depend largely on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s signature brash, glitter-bomb maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishing section alone — even before Austin Butler ’s locomotive hips start doing their herky-jerky thing when Elvis Presley takes to the stage to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” in a rockabilly-chic pink suit — leaves you dizzy with its frenetic blast of scorching color, split screen, retro graphics and more edits per scene than a human eye can count. Add in the stratified, ear-bursting sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.

If the writing too seldom measures up to the astonishing visual impact, the affinity the director feels for his showman subject is both contagious and exhausting. Luhrmann’s taste for poperatic spectacle is evident all the way, resulting in a movie that exults in moments of high melodrama as much as in theatrical artifice and vigorously entertaining performance.

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Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Release date: Friday, June 24 Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Director: Baz Luhrmann

As for the big question of whether Butler could pull off impersonating one of the most indelible icons in American pop-culture history, the answer is an unqualified yes. His stage moves are sexy and hypnotic, his melancholy mama’s-boy lost quality is swoon-worthy and he captures the tragic paradox of a phenomenal success story who clings tenaciously to the American Dream even as it keeps crumbling in his hands.

But the heart of this biopic is tainted, thanks to a screenplay whose choppy patchwork feel perhaps directly correlates to its complicated billing — by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner; story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. That mouthful suggests an amalgam of various versions, though the big hurdle is the off-putting character piloting the narrative, who creates a hole at its center.

That would be “Colonel” Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in arguably the least appealing performance of his career — a creepy, beady-eyed leer from under a mountain of latex, with a grating, unidentifiable accent that becomes no less perplexing even after the character’s murky Dutch origins have been revealed. It’s a big risk to tell your story through the prism of a morally repugnant egotist, a financial abuser who used his manipulative carnival-barker skills to control and exploit his vulnerable star attraction, driving him to exhaustion and draining him of an outsize proportion of his earnings.

Every time the action cuts back to Hanks’ Parker near the end of his life — refuting his designated role as the villain of the story from a Las Vegas casino floor where he ran up gambling debts that necessitated keeping Elvis under a lucrative International Hotel residency contract — the movie falters. As portrayed here and elsewhere, Parker was a self-serving con man who monopolized the star’s artistic and personal freedom and now gets to monopolize the retelling of his life. Elvis the movie works better when Elvis the man is a creation of ringmaster Luhrmann’s feverish imagination than when Parker keeps popping up to remind us, “I made Elvis Presley.”

The subject’s musical formation is illustrated in enjoyably florid Southern Gothic style as the young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) is seen growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, moving to a poor Black neighborhood after his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), is briefly jailed for passing a bad check.

Watching through the cracks in the walls of juke joints or from under the tent flaps of holy-roller revival meetings, Elvis absorbs influences that would allow him to fuse bluegrass with R&B, gospel and country, and create a sound unprecedented from a white vocalist. In one amusingly wild flourish, the roots of the “lewd gyrations” that would inflame screaming fans and conservative watchdogs in their respective ways are traced to the boy being physically possessed by the spirit during a religious service.

As they did in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere, Luhrmann and longtime music supervisor Anton Monsted freely mash up period and contemporary tunes once the teenage Elvis, his family by now relocated to Memphis, starts hanging out on Beale Street, where he befriends the young B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and thrills to the gospel sounds of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (English musician Yola). Given that Elvis’ vocal style drew from multiple inspirations, it makes sense for swaggering hip-hop and Elvis covers by a range of artists to weave their way into the soundtrack.

Initially enlisted by the Colonel to join a bill led by country crooner Hank Snow (David Wenham) and his son Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Elvis soon becomes the headliner, with Hank stepping away due to concerns that his Christian family audience might blanch at Presley’s heathen hip-swinging. But Elvis’ doting mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), who calms his nerves like no one else, reassures her son, “The way you sing is God-given, so there can’t be nothin’ wrong with it.”

The rapid-fire cutting of editors Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond allows Luhrmann to whip through the meteoric rise in popularity, the landing of an RCA recording contract and the encroaching threat of political morality police at the same time. Parker keeps the Presley family onside by making Vernon his son’s business manager, albeit without much clout or responsibility. Meanwhile, one of Elvis’ bandmates slips him a pill while on the road “to put the pep back in your step,” setting in motion a dependency that would famously spiral in later years.

Segregation rallies with alarmist warnings about “Africanized culture” and “crimes of lust and perversion” target Presley, and television appearances start coming with the stipulation of “no wiggling.” But Elvis’ fans don’t go for the cleaned-up, powered-down version; they want the excitement and danger that has female fans hurling their underwear at the stage. When Elvis gives them what they want, the Colonel fears he’s losing control of his meal ticket so he maneuvers to have him shipped off to serve in the U.S. Army in 1958 for an image makeover. Elvis blames his absence for his mother’s increased drinking and subsequent death, and yet Parker’s hold over him is too strong to shake.

By this point it’s clear that while the Colonel aggressively pushes himself forward as Elvis’ protector, he exhibits little to no genuine affection for his star client, regarding him merely as a revenue source. With Gladys gone, that leaves an emotional void around the title character, which may be true to life, but robs the film of immediacy. Even his marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) doesn’t do enough to counter that, which keeps Elvis remote just as Luhrmann should be drawing us in closer.

Too often, Luhrmann builds sequences like isolated vignettes rather than part of a consistently fluid narrative, for instance a romantic montage of Elvis and Priscilla in Germany during his military service, set to a pretty, wispy cover by Kasey Musgraves of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The sequence is sweet and dreamy, but it’s no substitute for getting to know Priscilla, a thinly drawn role beneath the hairdos and knockout fashions.

The action sprints forward through the rise and fall of Elvis’ movie career without lingering long (no Ann-Margret representation, sadly), but finds juicy detail in NBC’s 1968 comeback special. It’s conceived by Parker as a Christmas family special and a fresh merchandising opportunity for nerdy sweaters. But Elvis’ frustration with his career downturn causes him to take the advice of his old friend Jerry Schilling (Luke Bracey) and rework it on his own terms, angering Parker and the show’s sponsors at Singer.

Director Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery) reshapes the special, putting Elvis on a small stage surrounded by a TV audience. The raw rock ‘n’ roll set reaffirms Elvis’ influential place in American popular music just as he’s risking obsolescence. The recreated production numbers are a blast, with a gospel choir, “whorehouse” dancers and kung fu fighters. Elvis also shrugs off the Colonel’s insistence on closing with “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” instead performing the original protest song, “If I Can Dream,” which resonates powerfully just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The attention given in Elvis to the ’68 special suggests how much brighter Presley’s star might have burned had he gotten out from under Parker’s control more often. But when he tries to extricate himself, the Colonel convinces him to commit to five years at $5 million a year in Vegas, blocking the international touring plan of management team members who actually do appear to consider his wellbeing. Parker’s puppet-mastery is revealed to be about not just his gambling debts but also about his undocumented status in the U.S., which would have been exposed had he left the country.

Of course, this is ultimately a tragedy, and a different filmmaker less consumed by the bigness and brassiness of his enterprise might have dug deeper into the pathos. But there are moving moments, especially in Butler’s performance as he transforms into the puffy, sweaty Elvis of his final years (thankfully, his prosthetics are less of an eyesore than Hanks’), his marriage to Priscilla dissolving and causing sorrow for both of them.

One might wish for a biopic with more access to the subject’s bruised, bleeding heart, but in terms of capturing the essence of what made Presley such a super nova, Elvis gets many things right.

The live performance sequences are electrifying, shot by cinematographer Mandy Walker with swooping moves to match Presley’s dynamic physicality and with intimacy to capture the molten feeling he poured into his songs. The bold use of color and lighting is eye-popping. The same goes for the production design by Luhrmann’s wife and career-long collaborator Catherine Martin and Karen Murphy; likewise, Martin’s utterly fabulous costumes.

Luhrmann is often criticized for molding material to serve his style rather than finessing his style to fit the material. Many will dismiss this film’s unrelenting flamboyance as bombastic Baz in ADHD overdrive, a work of shimmering surfaces that refuses to stop long enough to get under its subject’s skin. But as a tribute from one champion of outrageous showmanship to another, it dazzles.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Warner Bros. Production companies: Bazmark, Jackal Group Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Davies, Charles Grounds, Josh McConville, Adam Dunn, Yola, Alton Mason, Gary Clark Jr., Shonka Dukureh, Chaydon Jay Director: Baz Luhrmann Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormack Director of photography: Mandy Walker Production designers: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy Costume designer: Catherine Martin Music: Elliott Wheeler Music supervisor: Anton Monsted Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond Visual effects supervisor: Thomas Wood Casting: Nikki Barrett

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In 'Elvis,' an icon remains an icon, and little else

Aisha Harris

Austin Butler as Elvis. Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Austin Butler as Elvis.

The conundrum facing every biopic about an extremely famous person – the kind of person who truly represents that now overused and diluted term "icon" – is in teasing the human out from underneath all that iconography. Beyond nailing the "look" or "sound," however one might interpret it, does this figure who's been referenced, impersonated, and memed ad nauseum feel like a real person again? Does the exercise result in a better understanding and/or appreciation of their work and what made them iconic in the first place?

A lot of biopics have trouble solving this conundrum. And few, if any, can fully avoid falling into hagiography, which is probably the most common trapping of the genre. Elvis , director and co-screenwriter Baz Luhrmann's dizzyingly absurd take on the life of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), doesn't just fail at making the so-called King of Rock and Roll into a three-dimensional human being; it actively plunges him further into the recesses of memedom, while making his legacy out to be far less interesting than it actually is.

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Tom Hanks, and a bizarre Euro-ish accent rivaling the cast of House of Gucci , star as Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's longtime manager who turned out to be little more than a huckster with a shady past. "The Colonel," as he's known, is both our narrator and nefarious villain who ruthlessly exploits Elvis, though he refuses to see himself as such. In the film's whirlwind of an opening sequence, the aging and ill Colonel insists it's not true he's responsible for the superstar's premature demise at the age of 42: "I made Elvis Presley." He may as well be twirling a wiry handlebar mustache.

From there, Elvis is primarily interested in returning to one loaded and mighty dull question: What, or who, really killed Presley?

To "answer" this, of course, we've got to go back to the beginning, and hit as many of the key points in Presley's history as possible – his early exposure to Black blues and gospel as a boy growing up in Mississippi and Tennessee; his stratospheric rise as a rock and roll sex symbol; the death of his beloved mother Gladys (Helen Thomson); his legendary 1968 TV special, his first of several comebacks; the drug addiction, and so on. In typical Luhrmann fashion, Elvis cycles through almost all of these events and others at breakneck pace, relying upon turbulent split-screen laden montages and the Colonel's signposting voiceover to do most of the heavy lifting in the storytelling department. If you've seen the movie's trailer, imagine all those elisions and quick cuts and dramatic flourishes, but over the course of a nearly three-hour runtime.

This approach can make for some raucous, energetic sequences powered by Butler's dynamic recreations of the performances – the hips wiggle with ease, and according to Luhrmann, it's mostly Butler himself singing those vocals. When he's offstage and the pressures of reality take over, however, the character of Elvis gets lost in the aesthetic cacophony or bogged down by clunky attempts to turn him into a tragic, uncomplicated hero at the mercy of a menacing manager. For one, his relationship and eventual marriage to Priscilla Presley is sanded down to ignore the fact that she was 14 years old –10 years his junior – when they first met.

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Elvis also tentatively flirts with his place at the intersection of politics, casting him in familiar light as a rebel whose gyrations and interpretations of "Negro music" incensed white parents and lawmakers, while being sure to note how sad he was about the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Yet curiously, Luhrmann couldn't find room – in a nearly three-hour movie! Did I mention this already? – to fold in that infamous meeting with President Nixon in 1970, where Presley, by then an elder statesman by pop music standards, railed against hippies and drug culture, which could have been an interesting dramatic contrast to explore.

Shonka Dukureh as Big Mama Thornton in Baz Luhrmann's new Elvis . Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Shonka Dukureh as Big Mama Thornton in Baz Luhrmann's new Elvis .

More frustrating, though, is how Elvis treats its subject's relationship to Black music and culture. Luhrmann and his co-writers know it's a facet that can't be ignored, but what is clearly intended to serve as tribute to Presley's Black predecessors and contemporaries plays out instead as lip service. Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey), B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), and Little Richard (Alton Mason) all pop up here and there in bit parts to draw out the lineage and demonstrate how Presley was embraced by Black communities in his early years. But if a viewer goes into this movie knowing little to nothing about Presley, they'll come away believing it was as simple as that, because the film consciously avoids the more fraught legacy he's had as the white "king" of a genre rooted in Black tradition.

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There's no mention of the widespread rumor that he once said "the only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes," a rumor that persisted for decades and no doubt helped cement him as little more than a cultural appropriator in the eyes of many. Concrete evidence of this failed to materialize, and it was shot down by Presley himself in an interview with the Black magazine Jet , where he added that "rock and roll was here a long time before I came along. No one can sing that kind of music like colored people." But excising any criticisms or apprehensions from Black artists in the script ultimately does a disservice to him and the inherent nuances in how his art has been received.

As tedious and surface-level as this whole exercise is, it's not boring. Big time Luhrmann fans and Presley fans alike will find enough to latch on to here; it's a movie brimming with nostalgia and admiration for its subject, complete with a Moulin Rouge -like mashing up of classic songs from the catalog with new interpolations by modern artists like Doja Cat and Diplo. (I'd argue that's more effective in Moulin Rouge and Luhrmann's ambitious series about the birth of hip-hop, The Get Down , where the characters have more time to develop in the midst of the vibrant, showy production.)

Yet by the end, a gaudy gloss remains coated upon the man, myth, and legend, Elvis. The movie's answer for what killed Presley, metaphorically speaking, will come as no surprise to anyone who's ever watched a biopic about a pop star. The zany excesses of Elvis just aren't enough to cover over the paint-by-numbers idolatry.

• Baz Luhrmann
• Austin Butler
• Elvis Presley

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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann’s sweaty, seductive biopic makes the King cool again

In luhrmann’s fairytale vision, elvis’ manager (tom hanks) is the evil stepmother, while austin butler’s king is the princess locked in a tower, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Shonka Dukureh . 12A, 160 minutes.

If we were to pull back the curtain on Elvis Presley, what would we even want to see? A soul stripped of its performance? Something cold and real behind the kitsch? I’m not convinced. America’s pop icons aren’t merely shiny distractions. They’re a culture talking back to itself, constantly interrogating its own ideals and its desires. I don’t think who Elvis was is necessarily more important than what Elvis represents. And, while you won’t find all that much truth in Baz Luhrmann ’s cradle-to-grave dramatisation of his life, the Australian filmmaker has delivered something far more compelling: an American fairytale.

“I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” utters Tom Hanks ’s Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, as the curtain rises (literally) on Luhrmann’s expansive, rhinestone-encrusted epic. “And yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story,” he adds.

Parker, who saw early promise in Elvis’s politically radical blend of country and R’n’B, slyly positioned himself as the sole overseer of the star’s creative enterprise – the man who won him a recording contract with RCA Records, who secured his merchandising deals and TV appearances, and who navigated him through a fairly brief but bountiful acting career. But Parker took far more in return. In 1980, a judge ruled that he had defrauded the Presley estate by millions. Some even blame him for pushing an overworked Elvis to the brink and ultimately contributing to his death.

For Luhrmann, the fairytale parallels couldn’t be more obvious. Parker is the evil stepmother, Elvis (here played by former child star Austin Butler ) is the princess locked in her tower – if that tower is, in fact, the vast and gilded stage of his Las Vegas residency. When Parker, a former carnival worker, first seduces Elvis to become his client, it’s in a literal hall of mirrors. That may sound a little absurd, but Luhrmann’s roots in the Australian opera scene have granted him a winning (though, to some, divisive) ability to deliver baroque stylings with a sincere, romantic sensibility.

I’ve always believed strongly in the purpose and necessity of Luhrmann’s outlandish visions – that it’s not enough simply to capture the grotesque consumption of The Great Gatsby ’s Jazz Age, but to prove that we, the audience, would be as weak to its charms as Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Nick Carraway. The same is true here, in the ways his subject is both seduced and betrayed by his own fame. And, anyway, Luhrmann’s always shot his films a little like Elvis performs – sweaty and kinetic, as the camera sweeps through the corridors of Graceland and through decades of his life with the fury of a thousand karate kicks.

​​Elvis will, and should, invite serious discussions about the musician’s outstanding legacy, and the film’s weakest spots speak mostly to how unsettled the debate around him still is. There’s certainly a lot to be said for how nervously the film tiptoes around his relationship with Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), who was 14 when they first met. Can a film speak on behalf of a woman who’s still alive and able to share her own story? And where do we settle on the great debate of Elvis’s wider role in music history? Was his success really another chapter in white America’s long history of cultural appropriation, or did that early, rebellious appeal in fact prove to be a surprisingly powerful tool in the fight against segregation?

Luhrmann’s film arguably offers the most plausible, romantic ideal of Elvis, even if it turns him into something of a naïf trapped under Parker’s spell. He is always, in Parker’s narration, referred to as “the boy” and never “the man”. He is the sweet-souled, blue-eyed momma’s boy who just wants to buy his family a Cadillac and play the music of his childhood, which was spent in the Black-majority communities of Mississippi. Even at the height of Elvis’s fame, the film is careful to constantly bring us back to the Black artists who inspired him, either through the musician’s own words (and he was always deferential to his origins, to the very end) or through Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond’s frenetic editing work. When singer-songwriter Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) launches into her rendition of “Hound Dog”, a voice on the radio commands us to listen – this is the voice of Black America speaking.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war. Parker thinks he can turn him into a clean-cut, all-American boy for the white middle classes, compelling him to accept the draft, cut his locks, and go to war. Elvis resists, and his gyrating pelvis (captured in many, glorious, zooms to the crotch) helps fuel the burgeoning sexual independence of young women across the country. “She’s having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy,” Parker notes, as the camera surveys one wide-eyed, lip-biting fan. Costume designer Catherine Martin – Luhrmann’s spouse, credited also as co-production designer and producer – dresses Elvis in an array of soft, dreamy pinks to sublime effect.

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To say that Elvis isn’t really so much about the real Elvis might sound like it’s taking the pressure off of Butler’s performance. But that’d be an entirely unfair judgement of what’s being achieved here – an impersonation of one of the most impersonated people on the planet, that’s at times uncanny without ever coming across as parody. Sure, Butler has the looks, the voice, the stance and the wiggle nailed down, but what’s truly impressive is that indescribable, undistillable essence of Elvis-ness – magnetic and gentle and fierce, all at the same time.

It’s almost odd to watch a performance so all-consuming that Hanks – the Tom Hanks – feels like an accessory. He’s all but buried underneath layers of prosthetics and a pantomime Dutch accent, seemingly cast only so that the warm smirk of America’s dad can trip a few people into questioning whether he’s really the villain of all this. Butler makes a compelling argument for the power of Elvis, at a time when the musician’s arguably lost a little of his cultural cachet. So does Luhrmann. So does the soundtrack, which is packed with contemporary artists (Doja Cat’s “Vegas” has sound of the summer written all over it). And while not everyone will be convinced by their efforts – I know that I’m ready for Elvis to be cool again.

‘Elvis’ is released in cinemas on 24 June

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‘Elvis’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic, Starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, Is a Stylishly On-the-Surface Life-of-Elvis Impersonation Until It Takes Off in Vegas

It's a spectacle that keeps us watching but doesn't nail Elvis's inner life until he's caught in a trap.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Elvis Presley , with the exception of the Beatles, is the most mythological figure in the history of popular music. That makes him a singularly tempting figure to build a biopic around. But it also makes telling his story a unique challenge. Everything about Elvis (the rise, the fall, all that came in between) is so deeply etched in our imaginations that when you make a dramatic feature film out of Elvis Presley’s life, you’re not just channeling the mythology — you’re competing with it. The challenge is: What can you bring to the table that’s headier and more awesome than the real thing?

Baz Luhrmann ’s “Elvis” is a fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream — a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera. Luhrmann, who made that masterpiece of romantically downbeat razzle-dazzle “Moulin Rouge!” (and in 20 years has never come close to matching it), isn’t interested in directing a conventional biography of Elvis. And who would want him to? Luhrmann shoots the works, leaping from high point to high point, trimming away anything too prosaic (Elvis’s entire decade of churning out bland Hollywood musicals flashes by in an eye-blink). He taps into the Elvis of our reveries, searing us with the king’s showbiz heat and spinning his music — and how it was rooted in the genius of Black musical forms — like a mix-master across time.

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Yet “Elvis,” for all its Luhrmannian fireworks, is a strange movie — compelling but not always convincing, at once sweeping and scattershot, with a central figure whose life, for a long stretch, feels like it’s being not so much dramatized as illustrated.

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Austin Butler , the 30-year-old actor who plays Elvis, has bedroom eyes and cherubic lips and nails the king’s electrostatic moves. He also does a reasonably good impersonation of Elvis’s sultry velvet drawl. Yet his resemblance to Elvis never quite hits you in the solar plexus. Butler looks more like the young John Travolta crossed with Jason Priestly, and I think the reason this nags at one isn’t just because Elvis was (arguably) the most beautiful man of the 20th century. It’s also that Butler, though he knows how to bring the good-ol’-boy sexiness, lacks Elvis’s danger . Elvis had a come-hither demon glare nestled within that twinkle of a smile. We’ve lived for half a century in a world of Elvis impersonators, and Butler, like most of them, has a close-but-not-the-real-thing quality. He doesn’t quite summon Elvis’s inner aura of hound-dog majesty.

Luhrmann has always had the fearlessness of his own flamboyance, and from the first moments of “Elvis,” which take off from an outrageous bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. logo, the film lets us know that it’s going to risk vulgarity to touch the essence of the Elvis saga. There’s a luscious opening fanfare of split-screen imagery, showing us how Elvis loomed at every stage, but mostly as the decadent Vegas showman who flogged his own legend until it was (no pun intended) larger-than-life.

But the way that Butler comes off as more harmless than the real Elvis ties into the key problem with the film’s first half. Luhrmann is out to capture how Elvis, the smoldering kid whose hip-swiveling, leg-jittering gyrations knocked the stuffing out of our sexual propriety, with his thrusts and his eyeliner and his inky black hair falling over his face, was a one-man erotic earthquake who remade the world. Yet Elvis’s transformation of the world was, in fact, so total and triumphant that it may now be close to impossible for a movie to capture how radical it was. With its over-the-top shots of women at Elvis’s early shows erupting into spontaneous screams, or throwing underwear onstage, plus scandalous headlines and finger-wagging moral gatekeepers growing hysterical over how Elvis was busting down racial barriers or promoting “indecency,” “Elvis” keeps telling us that it’s about an insurrectionary figure. The irony is that Luhrmann’s style is too ripely sensual, too post-Elvis, to evoke what the world was like before Elvis.

We see Elvis as a boy sneaking into a Black tent-show revival, fusing with the writhing gospel he encounters there, or hearing Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) sing “That’s All Right Mama” in a slow high blues wail. Then we hear what Elvis did with that music, syncing it to his own speedy spirit. Elvis stole the blues, all right, or at least borrowed them, but the movie shows us how he frosted them with a bouncy layer of country optimism and his own white-boy exhibitionism. The film dunks us in Elvis’s blue-suede bliss and then checks us, after a while, into his heartbreak hotel. In a way, though, I wish that Luhrmann had told Elvis’s story in the insanely baroque, almost hallucinogenic fashion of “Moulin Rouge!” For all the Elvis tunes on the soundtrack, the film doesn’t have enough musical epiphanies — scenes that blow your mind and heart with their rock ‘n’ roll magic.

And what “Elvis” never quite shows us, at least not until its superior second half, is what was going on inside Elvis Presley. For a while, the film plays like a graphic novel on amphetamines, skittering over the Elvis iconography but remaining playfully detached from his soul. Instead, it filters his story through the point-of-view of his Mephistophelean manager Svengali, Col. Tom Parker, who is played by Tom Hanks , under pounds of padding and a hideous comb-over, as a carny-barker showman with a hooked nose and a gleam of evil in his eye.

By framing “Elvis” as if it were Parker’s self-justifying story, the movie structures itself as a tease: Will it really show us that Parker, as he claims in his voice-over narration, has been given a bum rap by history? That he not only made Presley’s career but had his best interests at heart? No, it will not. Yet Luhrmann, in presenting the Dutch-born, never legally emigrated Parker (née Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk) as a master flimflam artist who saw himself as the P.T Barnum of rock ‘n’ roll, revels in a certain fascinating ambivalence. Hanks, with his mustache-twirling accent and avaricious gleam, makes Parker a cousin to Jim Broadbent’s nightclub impresario in “Moulin Rouge!” — a corrupt showman who will do and say anything to keep the show going. Parker latches onto Elvis in 1955, then stage manages his career to within an inch of its life. Elvis, turned into the Colonel’s hard-working show horse, becomes a victim of Stockholm syndrome; no matter how much he sees through the Colonel’s schemes, he can’t bring himself to quit him. Yet he spends the rest of his life rebelling against him.

The movie shows us how Elvis’s career, after its volcano eruption in the mid-’50s, became a series of defeats and escapes. To calm the controversies that Elvis first inspired, the Colonel repackages him as “the new Elvis” (read: a singer of family-friendly ballads), which only makes Elvis miserable. To further defuse the attacks upon him, Parker, in 1958, encourages Elvis to go into the Army as a way to clean up his image. Stationed in Germany, Elvis meets the teenage Priscilla — but it’s one of the film’s telling flaws that the actress who plays her, Olivia DeJonge, registers strongly in an early scene but scarcely has the chance to color in her performance. Given the film’s epic ambition, the script of “Elvis” (by Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) is a weirdly bare-bones affair. Hanks delivers a performance that’s a luscious piece of hambone duplicity, but why aren’t there more piercingly written scenes between Elvis and the Colonel? Or Elvis and Priscilla? The Colonel should have been a great character, not a succulent trickster cartoon. If these relationships had been enriched, the story might have taken off more.

That Luhrmann compresses most of the 1960s into a two-minute campy montage, which parodies Elvis’s life as if it were one of his movies, is the clearest sign that “Elvis” is no orthodox biopic. The film’s second act leaps ahead to Elvis’s 1968 comeback special — the filming of it, and the backstage politics, which involve Parker promising NBC that they’re going to be getting a Christmas special, a plan we see undermined at every turn by Elvis and the show’s director, Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery). The comeback special was, of course, a triumph, but the way Luhrmann tries to package it as a drama of sneaky rebellion doesn’t quite come off.

What comes off with startling power is the final third of the movie, which is set in Las Vegas during Elvis’s five-year residence at the International Hotel. For years, it became a cliché to mock Elvis for having embraced the shameless Middle American vulgarity of Vegas: the shows that opened with the “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fanfare from “2001,” the karate moves, the brassy orchestral sound of songs like his reconfigured “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And, of course, he was on drugs the whole time. What Luhrmann grasps is that the Vegas years, in their white-suited glitz way, were trailblazing and stupendous — and that Col. Parker, in his greedy way, was a showbiz visionary for booking Elvis into that setting. The film captures how Elvis did some of his greatest work as a singer there, apotheosized by the avid ecstasy of “Burning Love.”

Yet as “Elvis” dramatizes, Vegas also became Presley’s prison, because Parker nailed him to a merciless contract, and for the most scurrilous of motivations: The Colonel needed Elvis at the International to pay off his own mountainous gambling debts, even if that meant that the singer, offstage (and, ultimately, onstage), became a slurry, pill-popping ghost of himself. Our identification with Elvis only deepens as we realize that he’s “caught in a trap.” The film’s richest irony is that Butler’s performance as the young Elvis (the one who’s far closer to his own age) is an efficient shadow of the real thing, but his performance as the aging, saddened Elvis, who rediscovered success but lost everything, is splendid. He’s alive onstage more than he was doing “Hound Dog,” and offstage, for the first time in the movie, Elvis becomes a wrenching human being. Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.

Reviewed at Warner Bros. Screening Room (Cannes Film Festival, Out of Competition), May 13, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 159 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a Bazmark Production, Jack Group Production production. Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss. Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormick.
• Crew: Director: Baz Luhrmann. Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Camera: Mandy Walker. Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond. Music: Elliott Wheeler, Elvis Presley.
• With: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Dacre Montgomery, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Gary Clark Jr.

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Review: Austin Butler is the King incarnate in Baz Luhrmann’s manic, hip-swiveling ‘Elvis’

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Why hasn’t there been a great Elvis biopic yet? Well, Austin Butler wasn’t around to star as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. At the center of Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling pop epic “Elvis,” a film as opulent and outsize as the King’s talent and taste, Butler delivers a fully transformed, fully committed and star-making turn as Elvis Presley. The rumors are true: Elvis lives, in Austin Butler .

Swirling around Butler’s bravura performance is a manic, maximalist, chopped-and-screwed music biopic in which Luhrmann locates Elvis as the earth-shaking inflection point between the ancient and the modern, the carnival and the TV screen, a figure of pure spectacle who threatened to obliterate the status quo — and did. Luhrmann takes Presley’s legacy, relegated to a Las Vegas gag, and reminds us just how dangerous, sexy and downright revolutionary he once was. He makes Elvis relevant again.

Butler leaves it all on the screen, embodying the raw, unbridled sexual charisma of Elvis onstage. He is jaw-dropping, nearly feral in his portrayal of Presley’s most memorable musical performances, from his early days to his 1968 comeback special and his Vegas shows, and Luhrmann shoots and edits these scenes to capture not just Butler’s performance up close but also the powerful impact Elvis had on his fans.

Written by Luhrmann, Jeremy Doner, Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce, the film crams Elvis’ entire career into two hours and 39 minutes of breathless filmmaking, focusing on the energy and emotional beats of Elvis’ journey, as well as his exploitation at the hands of his manager, Col. Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks , heavily made up in prosthetics).

It’s 2022. Does Elvis Presley still matter?

Baz Luhrmann’s splashy “Elvis” biopic attempts to make the King relevant to a new generation. But 50 years after Presley’s last Top 10 hit, is it too late?

June 23, 2022

Luhrmann editorializes on top of that, using a heavy hand in the edit to continually remind us of Elvis’ roots and motivations, and the cultural importance of his ground-breaking career. Contemporary music on the soundtrack links Presley’s performance of Black music to the popularity of modern hip-hop; snippets of Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears hits remind us that Elvis paved the way for teen idols and that his story is also a cautionary tale.

The first part of the film, focusing on his breakout as a pretty white boy from Memphis, Tenn., who sang the blues, is fast, loose and dynamic, a whirlwind of honky-tonks, tent revivals, Beale Street blues and country music shows. The pace is frantic; it can’t sit still in the same way that Elvis can’t keep still when he’s singing, overcome by the music. Cinematographer Mandy Walker’s camera never stops moving, pulling us into this whirlwind of newfound fame, the wheels of the machine turning faster than Elvis can keep up.

The speed and overstimulation is heady and intoxicating, a stark aesthetic and emotional contrast to later chapters in Elvis’ career. The Hollywood days are a montage of color and costume, an inauthentic facade, as he sells out to corporations and the bottom line. In the last section, Elvis is stultified and oppressed, sapped of color and life, isolated in his “golden cage” at the International Hotel in Vegas.

The story is told from Parker’s perspective, a curious choice, though it serves a greater narrative purpose. From his perspective, we understand the spectacle that is Elvis; the colonel nearly licks his chops at the sight of this newest carnival attraction: a handsome, erotic, racial-boundary-crossing young man with a rough croon and a jet-black forelock who can make teenage girls scream. With visions of merchandise dancing in his head, the colonel turns Elvis into a global icon, but as “Elvis” argues at every turn, the colonel tamed the singer’s unruliness and artfulness, forcing him into cheesy movie musicals and relentless touring.

How ‘Elvis’ star Austin Butler lost — and found — himself in the King of Rock ’n’ Roll

Austin Butler poured everything he had into playing Elvis. The actor shares the grief, music and obsessive research that went into his portrayal.

June 24, 2022

Parker is the architect of Elvis’ downfall, extracting everything he can, clipping his wings, sanding down this culture-shifting force and offering him up as a titillating morsel of entertainment, the soul behind the talent tossed into the money-making machine and ground to dust.

The colonel’s narration and Hanks’ cartoonishly evil performance serve as a signed confession of guilt, as Luhrmann gives us Elvis as a Christ-like figure, a sainted martyr of rock ’n’ roll crucified on the cross of capitalism and greed.

While Butler humanizes Elvis, Luhrmann deifies him and argues that he possessed far more radical potential, both musically and politically, than he was allowed. His swiveling hips and jiggling knees weren’t just a portent of boy bands and pop icons to come — “Elvis the Pelvis” also threatened to usher in the sexual revolution and desegregate the South all at once, pushing rock ’n’ roll into the mainstream while starting the very first “culture war.”

“Elvis” isn’t just a reinvigoration of the Elvis myth. It’s also a resurrection of the King himself. Left the building? Not if Baz Luhrmann has anything to say about it.

Rating: PG-13, for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking Running time: 2 hours, 39 minutes Playing: In general release June 24

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Elvis is the Top Gun: Maverick of music biopics

Baz Luhrmann’s big swing at the King’s life is a thrilling theatrical spectacle

by Oli Welsh

Musical biographies are one of the most reliable genres in Hollywood’s arsenal. They trade on singalong appeal, showy star performances, and brand recognition that would make even Disney envious, and they’re often box-office bankers: The 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody made an incredible $911 million worldwide. So it’s surprising that it’s taken until 2022 for anyone to make a large-scale biopic about the greatest music icon of them all, the originator of rock stardom, Elvis Presley. And it turns out that Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann is the perfect choice to make an Elvis movie.

Since his run at movie stardom in the 1960s, the King has haunted cinema like a ghost. He’s been summoned as a symbolic spirit by Val Kilmer in True Romance and Bruce Campbell in Bubba Ho-Tep . His distinctive cadences and energy have been channeled into other, fictional roles, like Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart . His legend has been dissected and explored for meaning by questing documentaries like The King . But only one drama has told his story straight: 1979’s Elvis , directed by horror maven John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell. It’s a decent TV movie that decorously draws the curtain in 1970, before Presley’s decline and death.

Perhaps filmmakers have been reticent to take on his story because Presley’s iconography is intimidating in two ways: for its power and for its fragility. Everything about him has been internalized, rehashed, parodied, and remixed by popular culture to such an extent that it seems impossible to look at afresh, or to take at face value. His otherworldly looks and his eccentric mannerisms; his journey from ineffable cool to gaudy kitsch; his moves, his poses and his voice, that voice, with its purrs and growls and yelps and hollers and mumbles; his vivid youth and his pitiable, bloated end. How can you possibly cast him? How can you tell that story with any kind of stability?

It turns out that the crucial casting choice is not the actor, but the director. Baz Luhrmann is exactly what an Elvis biography needs: He has no restraint, no shame, and no self-consciousness. He’s the only filmmaker who could address the legend of Elvis Presley with the simultaneous high camp and emotive sincerity it deserves.

He’s also a master of musical set-pieces. That’s what makes his new film Elvis — starring Austin Butler as Presley and Tom Hanks as his notorious promoter Colonel Tom Parker — a must-see in theaters. The director who dropped “Love Is in the Air” at the ecstatic conclusion of Strictly Ballroom and turned “Roxanne” into an anguished, tragic tango for Moulin Rouge! has long had a talent for using pop hits to recontextualize his flashy melodramas, and in doing so finding new wells of emotion and relevance in the songs themselves. In Elvis , he brings all his virtuoso technique, his fearless anachronism, and his raw feeling to bear on staging a series of key performances from the King’s career.

These knockout sequences — half a dozen of them at least — are as audiovisually thrilling as anything else you can see in the cinema in 2022. They’re up there with the dizzying aerial ballet of Top Gun: Maverick . Every one is a feat of staging, editing, sound design, and musicological daring. A flashback to the Black slums where Presley grew up mashes up the sexual heat of the blues juke joints with the fervor of a gospel tent to stunning effect. Luhrmann is unafraid to crash contemporary hip-hop or wailing guitar solos into the sound mix to bring the raw excitement of Presley’s performances home. (And those of his Black contemporaries and heroes as well: One breathless sequence on Memphis’ Beale Street sees performances by Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and B.B. King meld and overlap.)

This is Luhrmann’s first and most important stroke of genius: In order to cut through half a century of mythmaking and image distortion around Presley, the music must come first. The second is knowing that his story needs a focus, and that Elvis Presley needs a dramatic foil if he’s going to seem like a real person. Luhrmann finds both of these in Parker, an untrustworthy, carnivalesque figure who exploited Presley financially, closed off many paths his career might have taken, and is thought by some to have driven Presley to his early grave.

Elvis casts Parker as both villain and (unreliable) narrator. The film damns him, even as he’s orchestrating it from beyond the grave, as the latest version of his “greatest show on Earth.” Casting Hanks in this role is a gamble that pays off, for the most part. It’s fair to say he isn’t a natural at the fat-suit-and-funny-voice school of acting, and it stifles some of his charm, but not all of it. A Gary Oldman or a Christian Bale might have been technically superior, but they would have pulled the story in a darker direction, and they lack Hanks’ warm comic flourishes and deep well of empathy. Luhrmann taps into these to find a touching, tragic dimension to the doomed, codependent relationship between the two men.

As Elvis, Butler is almost pretty enough, and he nails the drawl and the mannerisms without letting them overwhelm his delicate portrait of a half-shy, insecure man who could only intermittently find the courage to let his incandescent talent lead the way. He doesn’t manage to locate Presley’s depths, or the insane highs of his delusional ego. But Luhrmann, as obsessed with the stage as ever, is more interested in Presley as a performer than as a psychological subject. And on stage, Butler (who sings some numbers himself, and blends his performance with original Elvis recordings elsewhere) is dynamite: total physical conviction and lightning-rod charisma.

It’s just as well, since the script (co-written by Luhrmann and three collaborators) structures Elvis’ story around several volcanic concerts. There’s a rural hoedown where Parker is first struck by the delirium caused by Presley’s thrusts and gyrations, and a gig where Presley furiously rebels against the Colonel’s order to contain his “wiggling” after Presley’s moves start a moral panic. There’s the 1968 TV special when Elvis rediscovers his voice after his empty Hollywood years, and voices America’s anguish at the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy with an emotional protest song.

And there’s the first of the widescreen, spangled, sweat-drenched Vegas shows, when he debuts “Suspicious Minds.” Each time, Luhrmann strains every filmmaking muscle to put the audience in the room, to electrifying effect. And each time, the camera lingers on Parker as he looks on with either annoyance or rapacious glee. But eventually, Hanks lets these emotions slip away, as well as the possessiveness and jealousy beneath them, and shows us the same entranced, uncomprehending awe at Elvis’ god-given talent that his fans felt.

These are the narrative high points of a mostly conventionally structured cradle-to-grave, rags-to-riches biography. At 160 minutes, it’s very long, but also somehow breathless and rushed — Luhrmann handles the entirety of the 1960s Hollywood years in a single montage. He and the scriptwriters hit the beats they have to: Presley getting drafted into the Army, his mother’s death, meeting Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) and separating from her, his pill-popping and paranoia. Apart from one very moving late song sequence, Luhrmann curiously chooses not to show Presley’s late-life weight gain, perhaps because it offends his aesthetic sensibilities — he’s pursuing a noble, swoonsome kind of tragedy, not a grubby and degraded Raging Bull .

If there’s a throughline other than the relationship with the Colonel, it’s race, and the part it plays in Presley’s music. For some critics, Luhrmann has been too soft on Elvis’ appropriation of Black styles. But he doesn’t avoid the issue entirely. His counterargument, quite clearly laid out in the film, is that this was the music Elvis grew up with and sincerely loved, and it’s not his fault that a racist recording industry found him easier to sell than the artists he was inspired by.

Luhrmann shows Elvis in the early years singing R&B because it’s in his bones; he worries about getting arrested for it, but B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) tells him, “They ain’t going to arrest you. You’re white and famous. They’ll arrest me for crossing the street.” From the 1968 special onward, Presley can only make sense of his disintegrating life when he reaches for the spiritual purity of gospel. Luhrmann honors his Black inspirations by dropping them alongside him on the soundtrack, and in split-screen.

It’s a redemption of sorts, but it didn’t actually redeem him. Elvis, the great white megastar, was never arrested, but he eventually found himself in a different kind of prison. In some ways, his image is still trapped there. This ravishing, sad, exultant film — Luhrmann’s best since Moulin Rouge! — puts him back where he belongs.

Elvis opens in theaters on June 24.

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Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is one of best films of 2022 so far

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis movie  has joined Top Gun: Maverick at the top of the US box office, taking a cool £30.5m over the weekend. Anyone contemplating a trip to see the high octane, much-publicised biopic this weekend may well baulk at its 2-hour 39 minutes running time. The kind of length usually reserved for bloated Marvel flicks or arthouse directors being over-indulged on Netflix, films above the two and half hour mark usually leave you wondering who, if anyone, actually edited this thing (likely answer: no one!).

But Luhrmann isn’t a typical director, and Elvis isn’t a typical rock and roll biopic. Yes, strictly speaking, it tells the story of Elvis Aaron Presley, from his unconventional upbringing in Memphis right through to his lonely death in a Vegas hotel room. But it also manages to tell the story of America in the ‘50s, ’60s and '70s, which as much as anything is really the story of the birth of popular culture, celebrity and the new, capitalism-fuelled concept of being a teenager. Elvis was the unwitting mascot for all three, and in some senses remains so.

The breadth of the narrative, combined with Luhrmann’s frenetic, singular editing style means that, somehow, a little under three hours in a movie theatre doesn’t drag. In fact, reports there’s a four-hour-long Director’s Cut of Elvis waiting in Baz’s vault somewhere is actually rather enticing, which as somehow who likes their movies closer to the 90-minute mark is something I never expected to say.

OK, the first ten minutes of Elvis is admittedly ‘a bit much’: a relentless assault of huge musical notes, zip-zoom camera work and feverish montages. The film seems to be begging you to stick around, in the same way the opening of Romeo and Juliet , the film that made Luhrmann’s name back in 1996, did ( Don’t worry , it seems to cry, I promise this is going to be fun!! ). For a Shakespeare adaptation, this made sense: its appeal to young people relied as much on not feeling like a school trip to the local theatre as it did on Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-new blonde locks. You sense a similar initial doubt with Elvis in how cool or appealing the film’s subject matter is, and perhaps with good reason: the singer hasn’t really had a relevant or cool-again moment since that Apple advert remix of 'A Little Less Conversation’ in 2002.

But then two things happen. First, the film calms down a bit and the pace begins to vary. You remember Luhrmann is now of veteran of big cinema in complete control of his craft, rather than a young buck out to make a splash. Like Elvis’s music, the film begins to move like a ballad in places and in others, an explosion of rock and roll. The scene of Presley’s first gig, in which women of various ages reacted to his obscene hip thrusts with spontaneous peels of pent-up excitement and/or sexual frustration, is a virtuoso five minutes of filmmaking worth the price of entry alone: utterly thrilling and very funny at the same time. Like the dawn-lit dog chase in No Country For Old Men , it’s a masterpiece short within a full-length movie. 

Which brings us to the other reason Elvis doesn’t only justify its long running time, but is comfortably one of the films of the year so far: Austin Butler . It’s hard to imagine a bigger potential banana skin of an acting role than Elvis Presley, a man so eclipsed by caricature and impression, you can forget he was real flesh and blood. Austin Butler doesn’t just pull it off but is absolute dynamite in the role, somehow embodying The King while at the same time emerging as an unmistakable new star in the cinematic sky. The voice and the look is all perfect, but the hubris and humanity he brings to Elvis is a revelation. Luhrmann has compared Butler's breakout to Leo’s back in 1996 , but in truth it’s an even stronger performance than the lovesick Romeo. You don’t want to take your eyes off him, and in his hands Elvis is rehabilitated before your eyes from pop culture punchline to the brooding but vulnerable icon people fell in love with in the first place.

There have been grumblings about Tom Hanks, who co-stars as Elvis’s manipulative manager Tom Parker. But a few superfluous bits of narration aside, in which a deathbed Parker throws chips around a dreamlike casino, I actually didn’t mind the role. Yes, Hanks wears a fat suit and adopts a strange accent, but he’s an intelligent enough actor not to turn Parker into a cartoon baddie, and overall it lends the film a welcome extra scope to see how he took Presley’s naivety and used it to destroy him. Olivia DeJonge is underused as Priscilla, which is sadly usually the way of things, and the film could do with a stronger strain of secondary characters, but all of this somewhat proves my point: despite being about the most spoofed man of all time, despite being nearly three hours long, Elvis is a film that leaves you wanting more, not less. 

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Cannes review: Electrifying Elvis delivers the icon like never before

Director Baz Luhrmann recaptures his Moulin Rouge! mojo with a hip-swiveling profile loaded with risk and reward.

Senior Editor, Movies

Can it be that we really don't know Elvis anymore — not as the seismic force that shook people and remade the popscape? Barring those who actually lived through it (a group to be envied), that's almost certainly the case. Baz Luhrmann 's Elvis , a dazzling, splatter-paint evocation of the myth and the man, does a mighty job of bringing us closer to what that revolutionary moment must have felt like. It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes 's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine , the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.

Luhrmann, an inspired stylist who somehow managed to freshen up The Great Gatsby , doesn't make us wait long for the first of these jolts. Before unleashing a glimpse of his Presley, we hear the voice emanating off a percolating debut single, "That's All Right," then we follow a shadowy figure taking the stage at a 1954 concert, the emphasis on mystery and discovery. By the time Austin Butler stares down the lens and melts it (his revelatory performance, fully lived-in and vulnerable, never plays like imitation), Luhrmann has hooked us by the strangeness of it all: the slicked hair, the androgynous makeup, the girls in the audience uncontrollably leaping to their feet.

Already we've seen Elvis' snoozy country-music competition ( Kodi Smit-McPhee plays one of these casualties, almost a fan-fictional variation on his gangly creation from The Power of the Dog ), and there's no contest. "It was the greatest carnival attraction I'd ever seen," murmurs narrating uber-manager-to-be Colonel Tom Parker (a stunty, half-successful Tom Hanks ), and a thesis snaps into place, one that Luhrmann, himself an impresario, develops in a screenplay credited to him and three other contributing writers: This is story about salesmanship, onstage and off.

Elvis crystallizes as a media-minded showdown between Parker's product manager — he convinces the naïve Presley to commit exclusively on a Ferris wheel, if the circus metaphor wasn't clear enough — and an increasingly willful and visionary artist. Luhrmann's filmmaking style follows suit, beginning in a flurry of look-at-me zip pans and crotch zooms, Presley making his meteoric way up the marquee posters, then deepening into intense fourth-wall piercings as Butler's Elvis thirsts for authenticity. (The director's ear for jolting modern musical juxtapositions remains in full flower, with new contributions by Doja Cat , Shonka Dukureh and Gary Clark Jr. , among others; Presley's own classics are creatively remixed, covered, and sometimes even modulated into minor keys.)

Not a perfect lookalike (and that's fine), Butler does extremely well by the music and stage moves, but he's even more compelling during Presley's post-Army Hollywood years, presented as dissatisfied ones. Elvis has an extended centerpiece that you can't quite believe arrives in a major studio movie: a behind-the-scenes exfoliation of Presley's landmark 1968 TV comeback special, during which Parker's dreams of wholesome Christmas entertainment collide with an increasingly politicized singer, shaken by the recent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ("He's not even wearing the sweater!" a panicky executive barks in the control room, confronted by Butler's leather-clad, gospel-belting Presley.)

As fun as Elvis often is, it scores some remarkably sharp points, particularly regarding Presley's unfaked love of Black musicians, and the appropriations that fueled his crossover success. Of the many biopics to enshrine the King (and Elvis eclipses them all), none has featured a triple split-screen montage charting the performance of a single song back to its blues-shack roots. (Even the serious Presley documentaries don't cement the point as clearly as Luhrmann does.) "Too many people are making too much money to put you in jail," a shrewd B.B. King ( Waves ' Kelvin Harrison Jr.) tells Presley at one of his low points; the line is scalding.

For a filmmaker sometimes criticized for skimming the surface, Luhrmann uses the material to go as deep as he does wide. Sometimes Elvis feels like a lost Oliver Stone film from his daring 1990s heyday: a big-canvas exploration of debauched American appetites. Fittingly, the Las Vegas years slacken a bit, televisions getting bulleted and pills chased. Still, Luhrmann makes room for Nixonian paranoia, especially in one hushed conversation with estranged wife Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ). "I never made a classic film I could be proud of," Elvis, a James Dean fan, tells her. Fans of Blue Hawaii will wince, but something equally rare has come to pass — a portrait of a serious man trapped in an unserious life. Grade: A–

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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann brings The King to life in his signature pop style, with star turns from Austin Butler and Tom Hanks

Topic: Arts, Culture and Entertainment

Elvis is Luhrmann's sixth feature film in a career spanning three decades. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

On July 31, 1969, Elvis Presley took to the stage of the International Hotel in Vegas for the first time, still riding the high of his electric 1968 TV special, which had revived his flagging career.

What was originally conceived of as a four-week residency at the hotel – a brand new, $60 million development, then the biggest in the world – would spin out into a seven-year stint, bracketing off the final chapter of Presley's tragically curtailed career, the theatre a witness to his descent into a state of narcotised, rhinestone-encrusted stupor.

But it had started off so well: the huge theatre and a blue-sky production budget had inspired Elvis to put together a show that achieved new heights of kitschy extravagance.

Bassist Jerry Scheff recalled Elvis' opening night nerves to Time: “His knee [was] going up and down like a piston, his hands dancing like butterflies”. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

It's surely this Vegas-era Elvis – the jumpsuit-clad crooner, caped and spangled and accompanied by backup singers, a band, and a 40-strong orchestra – that called out to to Baz Luhrmann, himself an incorrigible showman with a bowerbird's eye for things that glitter and shine, and particularly those that are liable to break.

Taken collectively, his films advance a thesis that the greatest heartbreak is reserved for the most beautiful people – and who was more beautiful than the strange, pompadoured boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, with a voice like melting butter and those impossibly lascivious hips?

With Elvis, Luhrmann – whose last film took as its source material one of the signature works of American literature (The Great Gatsby, from 2016), and the film before that, the mythos of this entire nation (Australia, 2012) – gives the old bazzle-dazzle to what is perhaps his most iconic subject yet.

Butler auditioned by sending Luhrmann a tape of himself singing Unchained Melody and sings many of the early songs in the film. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

For the story of Elvis Presley is no less than the story of rock 'n' roll, from the backwater shacks and steamy late night clubs of the American south to prime-time national television.

And Luhrmann bravely takes it all in his kaleidoscopic sweep: with its often-hyperactive camerawork, the film plays as a 159-minute musical roller-coaster ride through Elvis's 42 years. You're liable to get all shook up, if not from tenderness of feeling then possibly from motion sickness.

Stepping into the King's blue suede shoes (well, two-tone) is Austin Butler, a blue-eyed Californian whose previous credits are mostly limited to teeny-bopper TV. A relative unknown, he's able to disappear into the role in a way that a bigger player (like Michael Shannon, playing a paranoid, lonely King in 2016's Elvis & Nixon, for instance) couldn't – if not to the same degree as the enigmatic Michael St. Gerard, whose uncanny resemblance to Presley saw him cast in the role several times in the late 80s and early 90s.

Much like Kurt Russell, the one-time Disney teen idol who bagged the lead in John Carpenter's 1979 made-for-TV movie Elvis, Butler gives a performance that should grant him entrée to the pantheon of hot young silver screen stars, as the sweet, soulful centre of this Wonka-esque confection.

Luhrmann described the real-life Priscilla as "self-possessed" in press notes. "Olivia [DeJonge] immediately struck me the same way.” ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

And it's only fitting that Elvis maketh the star and not the other way around. Even if his name doesn't hold the charge it once did, it's still undeniable that he exerted an influence that would be unimaginable in today's atomised pop-cultural landscape. There can be no bigger name on the poster than "Elvis".

Less camouflaged, despite being packed in prosthetics, is Tom Hanks, hamming it up in a rare villainous role: the shady former carnie who went by the name Colonel Tom Parker is, as he crows in his voice over narration, "the man who gave the world Elvis Presley".

He might just be the man who killed him, too – not directly, but via the escalating demands he would place on his client, and then by way of ensuring his access to the pharmacopoeia that, for a time at least, would make it possible for Elvis to fulfil those demands.

Back in his sideshow days, before he moved into managing musical talent, the Colonel (as he tells us) specialised in the kind of attractions that elicited feelings the punters "weren't sure they should enjoy". The squeals that issue involuntarily from all the girls when the young Elvis shakes his hips on stage – "Well, that's alright, mama," he drawls – tell Tom Parker that this kid has an act he can do something with; here was "the greatest carnival attraction" he'd ever seen.

The story unfolds – in a prismatic fashion, zipping giddily back and forward in time – nominally from the Colonel's perspective: his wheedling narration is a bid for absolution, though scene after scene works to condemn him.

"We’re not making a judgement ... it’s up to the audience to decide what they think about the Colonel. He’s not easy to love," Luhrmann told IndieWire. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

The film's sidelong look at its subject evokes Citizen Kane, perhaps cinema's definitive depiction of the process by which wild success transmutes into loneliness and narcissism. Like Kane, whose dying utterance of "rosebud" baffled even those who were once closest to him, Butler's Elvis – Luhrmann's Elvis – ultimately remains elusive; a larger-than-life figure able to be known only through so many layers of mediation – through his gold sunglasses and the camera lens.

"This ain't a nostalgia show," Butler's Elvis tells the musicians assembled on the International stage during rehearsal, and they launch into a beefed-up, flourish-laden version of That's All Right, the Arthur Crudup song that had been his debut single 16 years prior. (Crudup appears in the film played by Gary Clark Jr., his sultry blues an illicit thrill for the adolescent Elvis, played by Chaydon Jay.)

No one will be surprised to hear that Luhrmann's Elvis isn't a nostalgia show either – after all, the film is stamped with the golden insignia of the man who dressed Romeo in an aloha shirt and had a fin de siècle French courtesan sing Elton John.

The musical anachronism that felt egregious in The Great Gatsby, a story that is on some level about taste, plays better here – and I say this as someone who felt a pang of dread on seeing the words "Edge of Reality (Tame Impala Remix)" on the soundtrack listing.

The film premiered at Cannes in May this year and received a 12-minute standing ovation. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

It works in part because there's a discernible logic to the more outré numbers: Doja Cat's Vegas, woven into a scene of Black nightlife on Memphis' Beale Street, gives Hound Dog back to Big Mama Thornton, the first artist to record the track (played on-screen by Shonka Dukureh); Eminem's The King and I, though confined to the credits, draws a line between two white artists raised in a Black milieu, who drew on a Black idiom.

But it's also because Elvis himself, once just a boy with "greasy hair" and "girly make-up" who dreamed of buying a hot pink Cadillac, always defied good taste. In his landmark 1968 TV special, he sandwiched a musical number set in a brothel between a gospel medley and a "kung fu spectacular" . The King didn't discriminate – and it's precisely for that reason that he would come to define rock 'n' roll.

Luhrmann is no Elvis Presley, but you gotta love a spirited impersonation.

Elvis is in cinemas from June 23.

‘Elvis’ review: Baz Luhrmann’s bold biopic of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll

The 'Moulin Rouge!' director serves up a big-screen epic we can't help falling in love with

W ho killed Elvis Presley ? Was it the pills, the overworking, the hamburgers flown in from afar? Or was it his toxic relationship with sticky-fingered manager Colonel Tom Parker? Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic investigates it all, but focuses mostly on the latter – giving us a greatest hits tour of the King’s life from his jailer’s point of view.

We open on Parker’s final days. He’s a very ill man, stricken with diabetes, gout and finally a stroke. He wanders the streets of Las Vegas in a blurry, fevered dreamscape, stopping off at the casinos and concert halls where he gambled away Elvis’ millions and kept him performing every night for a pittance. Played by Tom Hanks, who steps into a rare villain role with dastardly panache, the Colonel narrates his demise like a guilty criminal pleading their case to the judge.

After this prologue, the film leaps backwards in time to 1940s Mississippi. During a fast-paced, flashy montage scene that’s vintage Luhrmann, Elvis skips through Presley’s dirt-poor beginnings. We get the boyhood rural hardship, the intense attraction to gospel music, and finally the move to Memphis. It slows down briefly for a tone-setting early performance filled with screaming girls and scowling men (that also introduces the hip-swivelling Austin Butler) – but soon speeds along again, packing in the rise of Elvismania, his European jaunt to Germany for national service, and marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge). Later, attention turns to Elvis’ Hollywood ambitions – and eventual financial troubles – as the film builds towards a tragic climax in Vegas.

Though it plays like a glitzy musical in the mould of Bohemian Rhapsody , Elvis also works as a much-needed lesson about America’s cultural history. Some of the best moments see the star interact with his biggest influences – such as Little Richard ripping through ‘Tutti Frutti’ in a dingy backroom bar; or B.B. King providing a calm refuge (and some sage advice) when the attention starts to overwhelm him. Elvis owes his legacy to Black music – and Luhrmann is sure to namecheck as many of those rock and roll pioneers (Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Arthur Crudup) as possible, often with well-cast cameos.

Naturally, this strong heritage filters through to the soundtrack, which boasts an almost festival line-up’s worth of modern chartbusters paying homage to Elvis and his predecessors. There’s all-conquering pop-rapper Doja Cat , who refits ‘Hound Dog’ with a fiery, trap-flavoured beat, as well as clever reworkings from the likes of Eminem , Kacey Musgraves , Stevie Nicks and even Euro-glam gladiators Måneskin . They aren’t strictly needed – Butler’s impressive vocals are worth a covers album on their own – but the modern sounds help freshen up a decades-old discography.

As with any movie about a real-life figure, some events have had to be cut. There’s no meeting with The Beatles at his Bel-Air home ; certain important romances are omitted; and we don’t get to see much of pre-fame Presley learning his craft. Perhaps this is because Butler is so compelling as ‘Old Elvis’. Bloated by overindulgence, he lounges in his pitch-black, top-floor hotel suite popping pills to numb the pain – and popping more to keep him awake for those never-ending casino concerts. In one moving final scene, footage of Butler is spliced together with an actual performance of Presley filmed shortly before he died. He’s clearly intoxicated and an assistant has to hold the microphone for him as he plonks away at the piano. The overwhelming feeling is of sadness, but strangely admiration too. Even at his lowest, Elvis’ commitment to putting on a show for his fans was total. If only Parker had been as loyal, he might still be on-stage now.

• Director: Baz Luhrmann
• Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge
• Release date: June 24

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The life of American music icon Elvis Presley, from his childhood to becoming a rock and movie star in the 1950s while maintaining a complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker... Read all The life of American music icon Elvis Presley, from his childhood to becoming a rock and movie star in the 1950s while maintaining a complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The life of American music icon Elvis Presley, from his childhood to becoming a rock and movie star in the 1950s while maintaining a complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

• Baz Luhrmann
• Sam Bromell
• Craig Pearce
• Austin Butler
• Olivia DeJonge
• 2K User reviews
• 343 Critic reviews
• 64 Metascore
• 93 wins & 232 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• Colonel Tom Parker

• Jimmie Rodgers Snow

• Jerry Schilling

• Steve Binder

• Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup

• Sister Rosetta Tharpe

• Dixie Locke

• Scotty Moore

• Little Richard

• Big Mama Thornton …
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia For his audition tape, Austin Butler originally recorded himself singing "Love Me Tender." When he watched it, he felt like it was an Elvis impersonation, and refused to submit it. A few days later, he had a nightmare that his deceased mother was dying again. Overwhelmed with grief and with the Elvis audition still on his mind, he decided to pour his emotion into music. Thinking of the lyrics to "Unchained Melody," he remembered, "I always take it for granted that that's to a romantic partner, [but] what if I sing that to my mom?" He sat down at the piano in his bathrobe and filmed it. "And that way of channeling those emotions just felt true," the actor said. The video immediately caught director Baz Luhrmann 's attention, as he was both confused and intrigued. Luhrmann stated, "Was it an audition? Or was he having a breakdown?" The director expressed that the audition felt like a spycam. Luhrmann asked to meet with Butler and eventually gave him the part.
• Goofs Elvis sings Trouble in 1956. Leiber and Stoller wrote the song in 1958.

Gladys Presley : The way you sing is God-given, so there can't be nothin' wrong with it.

• Crazy credits At the very end of the movie, the voice of Elvis Presley can be heard greeting the audience.
• Connections Edited from Frank Sinatra's Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley (1960)
• Soundtracks Suspicious Minds Written by Francis Zambon (as Mark James) Performed by Elvis Presley Courtesy of RCA Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 2K

• Jul 3, 2022
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• Is Elvis Presley's music used in the movie?
• Did they film any scenes in Memphis?
• Who actually performs the vocals of the songs in this film?
• June 24, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Warner Bros.
• Stage 5, Village Roadshow Studios, Oxenford, Queensland, Australia
• Warner Bros.
• Bazmark Films
• Roadshow Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $85,000,000 (estimated)
• $151,040,048
• $31,211,579
• Jun 26, 2022
• $288,670,284

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 39 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Atmos

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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann’s ridiculous, sublime biopic

The first time we get a good look at the title character of Baz Luhrmann’s caffeinated Wikipedia spectacular, Elvis , he’s stepping out of the shadows and onto a stage in Louisiana, ready to perform for a crowd totally unaware that they’re about to witness the coronation of the future king of rock ’n’ roll. Decked out in pink from shoulders to ankles, the 19-year-old heartthrob hesitates, and the audience, smelling blood, heckles him. But then Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) launches into the opening notes of what will become his first national hit, Baby, Let’s Play House , and as he belts and strums, his body lurches and thrusts. He moves as if struck by lightning, and the electric current passes through the whole venue, jolting awake the young women in attendance, their libidos instantly sparked by his suggestive country-preacher gyrations.

Too many biopics to count include a star-is-born moment like this one. But Luhrmann, the irrepressible carnival-barker glutton behind Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby , stages the sequence with a hellzapoppin’ flair that pushes it past cliché, on to parody, and then beyond that still, to a fever pitch of cartoon hysteria. A thunderbolt of electric guitar embellishes the song, sacrificing historical realism on the altar of cross-era, arena-rock glory. And the girls don’t just scream. They explode into a kind of involuntary rapture, as if possessed by the spirit of Presley’s raw animal magnetism. Supercharging a stock music-drama convention, Luhrmann reaches for the heights of myth: The rise of a radio god as a one-man sexual revolution, releasing all the pent-up frustration of America’s youth and halving history in the process.

That kind of energy dominates Elvis . On paper, the movie is pure biographical boilerplate, connecting 25 years of bullet points in the life and career of the bestselling solo recording artist of all time. Yet Luhrmann is no accountant or hall-of-fame historian. Right from the start, he cuts the music biopic into a mad flurry, caricaturing its familiar beats, tackling its obligations through a scrapbook collage of headlines and crowd shots and split-screen action. Elvis is structured like a nearly three-hour sizzle reel. It doesn’t so much have scenes as suites. It moves .

Luhrmann’s MTV overdrive approach might be as strategic as it is pathological. Elvis can only cover all the ground it needs to cover at warp speed, telling elements of its decades-spanning true story through implication and shorthand. The rise to fame. The battle against scandalized moral scolds. The subsequent backlash to the compromised, pastor-friendly Elvis, which is basically the singer’s Dylan-goes-electric moment in reverse. Elvis races through all of it. Meanwhile, the King’s career in Hollywood is relegated to a single, stylish Technicolor montage. His service overseas is omitted entirely.

To the extent that this maximalist Graceland revue has a dramatic center, it’s the initially symbiotic, increasingly parasitic relationship between Elvis and his infamously exploitative manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). The script, an obvious patchwork of drafts by Luhrmann and others, starts the story with Parker catching scent of the superstar at an embryonic stage. (His discovery that the million-dollar voice on the radio belongs to a white man is accompanied by a hilarious smash zoom into Hanks’s face, disguised by a fake nose and animated with shock and the lust of opportunity). Parker ends up seducing Elvis into a contract at the fairgrounds, issuing his Faustian pitch at the top of a Ferris wheel. Among other things, this is an innocence lost story: One montage of many crosscuts Elvis losing his virginity with shots of his mother fretting.

What Parker calculated was the immense commercial potential in Presley’s culture vulturing, the way he repackaged for a white audience the sound and moves of the Black artists he listened to in his youth. Elvis naturally foregrounds that aspect of the musician’s rags-to-riches story, even folding it into the Walk Hard tropes it energizes: As the King struts to the stage, Luhrmann cuts to footage of a preteen Presley spying on a barnyard performance by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup , a truer contender for the title of rock ‘n’ roll’s father. Later, a thrillingly assembled sequence depicts Elvis literally walking between white and Black America, at home on the lawn of a plantation and on Beale Street. The film grasps the true threat conservatives saw in Elvis — their fear of not just his exaggerated sexuality but also of the Black culture on which he was lucratively capitalizing.

Parker narrates the film, repeatedly insisting that Elvis’s eventual decline and death were a product of his tireless devotion to putting on a show, even as what we see puts the blame more squarely on the conniving, controlling guidance of his manager. That’s a potentially ingenious angle, to frame the story around the unreliable deflections of its villain. Hanks, though, is unusually, almost impressively atrocious in the role. The casting makes sense in theory, weaponizing the essential paternal decency of our most trustworthy Hollywood star into a manipulation tactic. But even a movie this outrageously heightened can’t support the fat-suit absurdity of Hanks’s performance, which compounds ghoulish Austin Powers makeup with a truly bizarre, vaudeville Nordic accent that sounds almost nothing like how the real man really talked. Hanks is simply too ridiculous to take seriously here, and his scenes tilt the film precariously close to sketch comedy.

Butler, sweating profusely though a rotating wardrobe of famously fashionable getups, fares better as The King. It’s a print-the-legend performance, all swagger and pinup-boy posturing, with much more attitude — and sex appeal — than psychology. But that suits a biopic with a greater interest in the seismic legend of Elvis than who he really was under all the supernova charisma and sequined white jumpsuits. That Butler sometimes resembles not so much Elvis as any number of flash-in-the-pan acts indebted to the artist’s style only reinforces Luhrmann’s implied conception of rock history as a game of telephone, distorting the original voice with each new delivery or generation. 

Elvis is everywhere, the film asserts — an idea it communicates through a soundtrack that slows down and airs out big hits like “Fools Rush In,” remixing them into a series of ghostly hymns echoing out of the pop-culture consciousness. The director of Moulin Rouge has also, of course, stocked his jukebox with anachronistic needle drops, alternating hip-hop with modern covers of The King to underscore how Elvis’s original act of appropriation is just one chapter in the twisting path of American popular music. It’s a more successfully drawn connection than the film’s numerous attempts to place Elvis against the tumultuous background of mid-century breaking news. Perhaps Hanks is really around to fortify the Forrest Gump associations of a script that periodically drifts to a television set and the assassinations reported on it.

After two-plus hours of relentless supercut summary, the film slows and runs out of steam. An essential component of the Elvis story is the downfall portion of it — those final ignoble years in Vegas, when the man ran out of comebacks, got hooked on pills, and became a prisoner to his casino residency and the vice grip Parker had on his pocketbook. It’s where the plot has to go, but in dutifully dramatizing the last act of this life, Luhrmann sucks all of the wild-man enthusiasm out of his material. The final act is a laborious slump into a tragically foregone conclusion, capped by obligatory archival footage.

Where it comes alive, before that, is on stage. Here, Butler’s sultry costume-party approximation of a luminary gels with Luhrmann’s cut-a-second restlessness to produce something like a monument to the mythology of Elvis. The movie gets by, for so much of its bloated running time, on the ecstatic, foolhardy reverie of its showmanship — the way it channels the King’s stomping stage presence through a breathless rush of image and sound, trying to whip the audience into the same frenzy that Elvis inspired in his own life. How, Luhrmann wagers, can we measure the life of this monumental, destabilizing figure through anything less than a head-spinning extravaganza? Here and there, the excess of his vision pays off, shifting from exhausting to exhilarating.

Elvis opens in theaters everywhere Friday, June 24 . For more reviews and writing by A.A. Dowd, visit his  Authory page .

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Austin Butler Is the Only Thing That Works in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis

Perhaps it’s by design that the Elvis Presley of the new biopic Elvis is rendered so unknowable. There’s lots of him in Baz Luhrmann ’s film, swaggering and crooning and sweating. But little of his inner life, the fire uniquely his, is communicated to the audience. It’s a film about a legend that keeps him just that: an idea, thrashing away at a distance.

That’s no fault of Austin Butler , the young actor handed a nearly impossible task. He has to embody one of the most impersonated people in modern history in, somehow, a new or revealing way—to move past caricature and toward something like personhood. Butler succeeds as well as Luhrmann will let him.

With his pouting lips and dizzying cheekbones, Butler ably embodies early Elvis’s almost androgynous—and yet still aggressively virile—magnetism. He does some of his own singing, and while he doesn’t quite nail the power and richness of the real thing, it’s a good enough approximation. Much later in this turgid 160 minute film, Butler gives good deterioration, all the pill haze and frustrated rage that defined so much of the singer’s final years. It may well be a star-making turn for the actor, a bold announcement of thespian vigor and ingenuity that even devoted fans of The Carrie Diaries didn’t know he had.

A shame, then, that Luhrmann works so hard to drown him out. Toweringly noisy and ceaselessly moving, Elvis finds Luhrmann working in overdrive to recapture the old flare that gave such florid life to films like Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet . But those films—and even Australia and The Great Gatsby —have a sense of order to their physics. Their cameras seem to move in intentional rhythm, soaring and swirling on rails only visible to their creator. But Elvis yanks and jerks and rattles all over the place, looking for shape and purpose in every direction and finding little of it.

The film settles down some toward the end, when Luhrmann actually lets us sit with a scene and attempt to absorb it. Much of the film’s runtime, though, is exhausting and irksome. Beyond-the-grave narration from Elvis’s shifty Svengali, Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), is meant to offer some narrative guidance—but his mutterings jump around erratically, eliding over foundational parts of Presley’s life in favor of wan observations about the singer’s burgeoning fame. Hanks, doing some kind of Dutch-ish accent, plays this conniving Rumplestilskin with the appropriate slime, but Parker’s looming presence in the film proves an odd storytelling choice. I’m no fan of rote music biopics, but what if, this time, we were just served a singer’s life story?

Maybe the calculation was that everyone knows everything about Elvis already, which certainly might have been true 30 years ago. Nowadays, however, his iconic status might need more arguing. The film does at least take advantage of some present-day hindsight: it is careful to note that Presley and other white rockers like him owed a huge debt to Black musicians who were criminally undervalued at the time (and now). But in some ways, that’s the only analysis the film bothers with. Otherwise, it trusts that we just want a busy wash of Elvis-ness without many of the boring details.

That’s an error, especially given that Butler is straining so hard to give us a full show. The musical performances are, as expected, the highlights of the film, particularly a scene at the Louisiana Hayride during which a theater full of young women have a collective sexual awakening. Elvis is successful on that front: we really do feel the ardent rumblings of all these girls (and, in one funny moment, a boy) as they see before them something that seems to click the last puzzle piece into place.

If only we learned more about the mind and heart from which that ecstatic revelation was emanating. It is the film’s bitterest irony that a story about a man controlled by a domineering force seems itself unwilling to give its subject true autonomy, lest that distract from its director’s aesthetic interests. Elvis presents the spectacular, but has little to say when the lights are off and it’s just the man, grasping to find purchase in the making of his own legacy.

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‘Elvis’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Deliriously Awful Biopic Is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ at 4,000 M.P.H.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Cannes  Film Festival. Warner Bros. releases the film in theaters on Friday, June 24.

“It doesn’t matter if you do 10 stupid things so long as you do one smart one,” Colonel Tom Parker advises us near the start of Baz Luhrmann ’s utterly deranged musical biopic about the King of Rock & Roll, but even a ratio that forgiving would still leave “ Elvis ” roughly 370 “smart ones” short. If only this 159-minute eyesore — a sadistically monotonous super-montage in which a weird Flemish guy manipulates some naïve young greaser over and over and over again until they both get sad and die — were gracious enough to be as short in any other respect.

Luhrmann may be one of the most irrepressible maximalists the movies have ever known, and his new opus is perhaps the most visually anarchic Hollywood film since the Wachowskis’ 2008 “Speed Racer.” But it’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

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Indeed, “Elvis” is so adoring of its style and so disinterested in its subject that “Baz” would have been a more fitting title for it. Why does a deliriously basic musical biopic spinning through time at 60 million RPM take longer to give Elvis Presley the “Bohemian Rhapsody” treatment than Luhrmann needed to adapt “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Great Gatsby,” or the entire continent of “Australia”? Because the “Moulin Rouge!” director — despite his obvious affection for Elvis, and his good-faith effort to worship the rock god as he saw fit — can’t help but leverage Presley’s iconography in a similarly self-serving way as Parker exploited his talent.

Unmoored from the narrative guardrails of a Puccini opera, a Shakespeare tragedy, or one of the tightest novels of the 20th century, Luhrmann is free to remix Elvis’ life and times into a Las Vegas revue that spotlights the filmmaker’s singular genius while also painfully enabling his own addiction to excess. Even in tribute, this maddening jukebox musical only sees Presley as a means to an end — as a hip-shaking puppet on a string. Which perhaps explains why Luhrmann was compelled to make Colonel Tom Parker the main character of his Elvis movie, “Elvis,” which the trailers had suggested was about someone named Elvis.

This may not be the stupidest of the stupid things that “Elvis” does, but it’s the stupid thing that no amount of “smart ones” can possibly balance out. Luhrmann loves himself a narrator — a layer of distance between opulence and tragedy — and theoretically, there’s no reason why one of pop culture’s most pivotal rise-and-fall stories couldn’t be told through the eyes of the Mephisto-like Svengali who launched Presley into the air and left him there in a permanent state of vertigo.

Sure, on paper that sounds roughly as appealing as a Britney Spears biopic narrated by her father. And sure, onscreen it’s even worse. But it isn’t impossible to see the appeal of placing an iconoclastic anti-authoritarian like Elvis in the shadow of the man who controlled him. Even the King bowed to someone, and Luhrmann’s dizzying script (co-written by Sam Bromell, Jeremy Doner, and Craig Pearce) frequently returns to the idea that Presley’s life was caught in the crossfire between two different Americas: One gyrating towards freedom, and the other snuffing it out.

The problem here is that Luhrmann’s Colonel Parker — Tom Hanks in a “true true” performance defined by a fat suit, a fake nose, and an accent that I can only describe as the “Kentucky Fried Goldmember” — is possibly the most insufferable movie character ever conceived. The guy makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” It’s as if Luhrmann watched Hanks’ performance from “The Ladykillers” and thought: “OK, what if that, but times 100 and for almost three entire hours?”

“Elvis” — and I wish I were joking about this — is presented as the dream that Colonel Parker has before dying. Kind of. Honestly, it’s hard to say where you are or in what context during a movie that spins in circles like a roulette wheel (often all too literally) and only slows down for a small handful of proper scenes along the way. One second, Colonel Parker is waddling around a Las Vegas hospital as an old man, and the next, we’re in full “Nightmare Alley” territory as the music impresario rolls through some hick fairground and hears a hot new song on the radio while looking for his next carnival geek.

Too bad Black acts don’t sell. Wait a minute! [the camera zooms in on Parker’s neck sweat, spins 360 degrees, speed-ramps through several different frame rates, invents six entirely new aspect ratios, and then lands on the prosthetic nose that only skirts anti-Semitism because no one knows for sure if the Colonel was Jewish] “he’s whhhhyyyyyiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittteee!?” [cash registers, fireworks, time moves in 12 directions at once, you see the moment of your own birth and death unfolding on a Brian de Palma split-screen]. Cut to: Elvis playing “That’s All Right” in an oversized pink suit as a concert for some local teenage girls suddenly turns into that scene from “Scanners.”

That won’t be the last time Luhrmann acknowledges his subject’s oft-discussed role in the history of American race relations — just wait until the feverish sequence where Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is framed as something that personally happened to Elvis Presley, and made him feel very sad — but it’s safe to assume that “Elvis” is less interested in the cultural etymology of Presley’s music than it is in the way that stiff ribbons of jet-black hair falls across Austin Butler ’s face every time he sweet talks into a microphone.

In fairness to Luhrmann, it’s quite a sight to behold. Butler’s immaculate Presley imitation would be the best thing about this movie even if it stopped at mimicry, but the actor does more than just nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to defy them, slipping free of iconography and giving the film an opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who’s been frozen in time since before Luhrmann’s target audience was born.

It’s an opportunity the director rejects at every turn. His Elvis never becomes his own man. Instead, he evolves from an avatar for post-war America into a helpless addict trapped in a golden cage. He doesn’t have a whit of agency in either mode; pin-balling through the years and bouncing from one superimposed newspaper headline to the next, Elvis doesn’t come off like someone who reshaped the 20th century so much as he does someone who watched it faint around him and then force him out. No wonder Elvis and Forrest Gump seem to keep crossing paths.

Rather than carving a meaningful path to guide Elvis through history, Luhrmann simply floats him through the years on a raft of non-stop music that bumps into an endless series of biopic clichés at light speed into the next until it finally capsizes a few decades later. The action moves so fast, and with so little weight, that I literally missed Elvis’ mom dying.

Then again, I hardly ever clocked her being alive in the first place. I only flagged his dad because Vernon is played by Luhrmann regular Richard Roxburgh, while Olivia DeJonge’s Priscilla skips from army brat to shrewish mom without stopping to land anywhere in between. At some point they mention Graceland, so there’s probably a scene where they buy it? I’d assume I just forgot a detail like that in the blur of it all if not for the fact that Elvis’ entire film career is squeezed into a single line of Colonel Parker narration that I transcribed verbatim for my sins: “I made him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history, and we had a lot of fun.” Terrible food, and such small portions.

The songs themselves can be thrilling when they’re anchored in reality — the late scene in which a sequined Elvis powers his way through “Suspicious Minds” is almost strong enough to give the character his own soul — but most of them come from nowhere, floating at random out of the ether as if from a broken jukebox. There’s nary a single moment in the movie of Elvis actually creating anything; he’s just a sexy oracle, receiving music from the collective unconscious and shivering it out through his body.

It’s as if Presley’s songs have always existed, and Luhrmann’s job is simply to make them new again. The filmmaker’s anachronistic flair has always been a fundamental part of his appeal, but here — listening to Doja Cat rap over “Viva Las Vegas,” which sounds pretty good — it’s hard not to suspect that his orgiastic exuberance might stem from a lack of faith in a modern audience’s ability to connect to this subject matter. If Luhrmann trusted us to care about Elvis Presley, his film would have found the confidence to try. Instead, Colonel Parker becomes the ultimate scapegoat; it’s OK that Elvis doesn’t have any discernible identity because this is a movie about the cartoonish chicken salesman who stole it from him.

Luhrmann’s sensory overload has resulted in some of the most swooningly electric moments in modern cinema, from the fish tank sequence in “Romeo + Juliet” to the elephant medley in “Moulin Rouge!” and that fantastic party sequence in “The Great Gatsby,” but the hyper-romantic energy of those films helped braid the present into the past in a way that made them both feel more alive. “Elvis” discovers no such purpose. It finds so little reason for Presley’s life to be the stuff of a Baz Luhrmann movie that the equation ultimately inverts itself, leaving us with an Elvis Presley movie about Baz Luhrmann. They both deserve better.

“Elvis” premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Warner Bros. will release it in theaters on Friday, June 24.

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LACMA’s Art+Film Gala to Honor Simone Leigh, with Charli xcx Set to Perform

By Maximilíano Durón

Maximilíano Durón

Senior Editor, ARTnews

Brat summer has officially been extended into fall. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host a special performance by Charli xcx at its annual Art+Film Gala, which each year honors an artist and a filmmaker. This year’s honorees are Simone Leigh and Baz Luhrmann. 

As with the past several iterations of the gala, Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio will serve as gala chairs and Gucci as presenting sponsor. Gucci also typically dresses the honorees.

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Leigh is one of today’s most closely watched artists. She is best-known for her large-scale sculptures of Black women that often include cowrie shells and raffia. In 2022, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale; her work was also included in that Biennale’s main exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani. Her contributions to the main exhibition won her the Biennale’s Golden Lion prize. Among the works included was Brick House , which Alemani had initially commissioned for the High Line, where she is director and chief curator. 

Leigh is also currently the subject of a traveling survey that debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which served as the commissioning institution for the 2022 American Pavilion. That exhibition is currently on view at LACMA and the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles. She has also appeared in the 2012 and 2019 Whitney Biennials, and she won the Guggenheim Museum’s now defunct Hugo Boss Prize in 2018.

Luhrmann is the director of Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001), The Great Gatsby (2013), and Elvis (2022). He also recently directed the cover for Vogue ’s September issue.

Charli xcx’s BRAT , which includes such bangers as “360,” “365” and “Von dutch,” has been one of the summer’s breakout albums.

In a statement, LACMA director Michael Govan said, “Simone Leigh is one of the most captivating and important voices in contemporary art, brilliantly melding an array of different artistic traditions and centering Black femme subjects in powerful and moving ways. Baz Luhrmann has crafted an emotional cinematic oeuvre over three decades, driven by his imagination and passion. We are excited to honor him alongside Simone and celebrate their remarkable careers.”

Added Chow, “I can’t wait for our amazing musical guest Charli xcx to bring the house down. It’s going to be a great evening!”

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