Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann proves he’s still the king of musical spectacle

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 RhapsodyA staggering $911 million was made 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. As it turned out, Moulin Rouge!Baz Luhrmann, director of Elvis movies is the ideal choice.

The King haunts cinema like a ghost since his fame in 1960s movies. He’s been summoned as a symbolic spirit by Val Kilmer in True Romance Bruce Campbell 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. The legend of the man has been deconstructed and explored in questing documentary like The King. But only one drama has told his story straight: 1979’s ElvisThe horror legend John Carpenter directed the film and Kurt Russell starred in it. 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. His entire life has been parodied and rehashed by pop culture, making it difficult for anyone to view or accept his work as true. His eccentric looks and bizarre mannerisms. The journey of ineffable cool into gaudy kitsch. That Voice, his purrs, growls, and yelps, and hollers, and mumbles, his vibrant youth, and his pitiable and bloated ending. You can’t cast him. Is it possible to tell this story without losing any stability?

Warner Bros.

Turns out, the key casting choice isn’t the actor. It’s the director. Baz Luhrmann, the perfect choice for an Elvis biography, is the exact opposite: He doesn’t have any shame or restraint and he has 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!He has always had the talent of using pop songs to recontextualize flashy melodramas and finding new sources of emotion in them. You can find it here. 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 Maverick: Top Gun. Each one requires a lot of editing, sound design and musical daring. Flashbacks to Presley’s youth in Black slums are mashed up with the gospel-tuned passion of a gospel band to spectacular 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 is a fusion of overlap and melding.

Kane Skennar/Warner Bros.

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 sees both these qualities in Parker. Parker is an untrustworthy and carnivalesque figure that exploited Presley financially. He closed off many avenues his career could have taken and was believed to be the one who drove Presley to his death.

ElvisParker is both the 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 uses these elements to add a poignant, tragic element to their codependent, doomed relationship.

Butler looks almost as Elvis. He has the perfect drawl, mannerisms, and voice. He doesn’t manage to locate Presley’s depths, or the insane highs of his delusional ego. Luhrmann however, who is just as obsessed as ever with Presley on stage, has a greater interest in Presley as an entertainer than as a psychological subject. Butler is also a star on the stage. He sings some songs himself and blends them with Elvis original recordings from elsewhere.

Hugh Stewart/Warner Bros.

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. Parker watches the cameras with either anger or reckless glee as they linger on him. 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 narrative highlights are the high points in a mostly traditionally constructed cradle–to–grave, rags–to-riches biographical story. 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.

Warner Bros.

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 honours Black inspirations, dropping them along with him in the soundtrack.

It’s a redemption of sorts, but it didn’t actually redeem him. Elvis, the white great star of pop, was not arrested. However, he ended up in a new type prison. He is still there, in part because of his appearance. This ravishing, sad, exultant film — Luhrmann’s best since Moulin Rouge! — puts him back where he belongs.

Elvis On June 24, the movie opens in theatres