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• 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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‘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.

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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“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.

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Elvis (2022)

Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking.

159 minutes

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley

Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker

Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley

Dacre Montgomery as Steve Binder

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
• Sam Bromell
• Craig Pearce

Cinematographer

• Mandy Walker
• Jonathan Redmond
• Elliott Wheeler

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How “Elvis” Plays the King

By Anthony Lane

Last year was not great for Elvis Presley. According to Forbes , which tallies up the take-home pay of the dead, he made a mere thirty million dollars in 2021—more than Arnold Palmer, it’s true, but less than Bing Crosby and Dr. Seuss. Elvis can rest easy, though. This year, his income could see a healthy spike, thanks to the latest Baz Luhrmann film, “Elvis,” which features Austin Butler in the title role. Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers, however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale. This is not a movie for suspicious minds.

Any fan of musical bio-pics will be familiar with the form: a hop, a skip, and a jump from one highlight to the next. (Some of the highs, needless to say, are lows.) In the case of Elvis, this means that we meet him in his youth—played by the striking Chaydon Jay, the rare intensity of whose gaze really does set the kid apart. Hurrying onward, we get a pit stop of Elvis as a truck driver, with his guitar swung up over his shoulder like a rifle; the cyclonic sight of Elvis onstage, pretty in pink, and whipping a crowd into a Dionysian froth; Elvis on the Steve Allen show, in white tie and tails, singing “Hound Dog” to a gloomy pooch; Elvis escaping to Beale Street, in Memphis, to hang out with B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and to revel in Little Richard (Alton Mason); Elvis in Army uniform, looking impossibly spiffy and pitching his woo to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), the daughter of a captain; Elvis lamenting the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy; Elvis lounging inside a vowel on the Hollywood sign, and being told that his career is “in the toilet”; Elvis performing in residence at the International Hotel, in Las Vegas, flush with renewed success; and Elvis sitting sadly in a limousine, beside a private jet, and saying to Priscilla, “I’m gonna be forty soon, ’Cilla. Forty .” Has the prospect of age never occurred to him until now? Two years later, he is gone, though the movie spares us the unlovely particulars of his end.

Guiding us through this strange saga, in which the most private moments feel like public property, is Colonel Tom Parker. As has long been established, he was not a proper colonel, or a Parker, or even a Tom. He was a Dutchman, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, who went to America and erected a new identity for himself, as breezily as someone putting up a big top. He became Elvis’s manager, magus, m.c., and (many would argue) terminator. Were Kevin Spacey not otherwise engaged, he’d be a natural fit for the part. Instead, it goes to Tom Hanks, with a sharpened nose, a shiny pate, and a cladding of false fat. For dedicated Hanksians like me, these are confusing times; compare the trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Pinocchio,” in which Hanks—Einstein wig, a hedge of mustache, and, I suspect, yet another nose—assumes the role of Geppetto. At present, for whatever reason, this most trusted of actors has chosen to seek cover in camouflage and to specialize in the pulling of strings, whether wicked or benign. As Parker says, in one of many voice-overs, “I didn’t kill him. I made Elvis Presley.” It’s a real boy!

How do you wish yourself upon a star? Simple. Parker takes Elvis on a Ferris wheel, stops at the top of the ride, and, like the Devil, sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world. “Are you ready to fly?” Parker asks. There is nothing subtle about the staging of such scenes, but then Luhrmann, as was evident in “ Moulin Rouge! ” (2001), makes a proud virtue of unsubtlety. Little is left unspoken or half concealed. Young Elvis, for instance, peering through a crack in a shack, spies a couple of dancers, writhing and perspiring to the lusty wail of the blues; he then runs to a nearby tent, sneaks inside, and enters a Black revivalist meeting, which gives him the Pentecostal shakes. The proximity of the two locations is frankly ludicrous, but it allows Luhrmann to hammer home his point: the Presley sound was forged in a double ardor, sacred and profane. You don’t say.

As with every chronicle, there are gaps where you least expect them. Thus, any Elvis addict is steeped in the lore of July, 1954—the late session at Sun Studio, in Memphis, when Elvis, together with Scotty Moore, on lead guitar, and Bill Black, on bass, was about to call it a night, dissatisfied with what they’d done so far. For a lark, they began messing around with an old number called “That’s All Right, Mama,” taking it at a driven but drumless lick. The producer, Sam Phillips, roused to action by what he was hearing, told them to start again. As earthquakes go, it was all the more potent for being so comically casual, and it cries out to be dramatized; imagine what Robert Altman or Jonathan Demme might have done with such a scene. But Luhrmann gives it barely a glance. He prefers spectacular set pieces, stretched out instead of whittled down. Hence the space that he grants to the famous comeback concert of 1968, with Elvis resplendent in black leather, and, later, to a large slab of Vegas-era pomp, with Elvis all aglow in studded white, like a naughty angel on the loose. The curious thing is that both events already exist as visual records. The first was a TV production, the most popular broadcast of the season, and the second was enshrined in a 1970 documentary, “ Elvis: That’s the Way It Is .” Both can be streamed whenever you please. Luhrmann may be kicking up a storm, but the thunder is nothing new.

Grab a bathroom break in the middle of “Elvis” and you could easily miss the speediest part of the film. This is a montage devoted to Elvis’s least purple patch, in which he headed west, at Parker’s urging, to be a movie star. The result included such immortal works as “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) and “Clambake” (1967), and “Elvis” duly supplies its hero with a leading man’s lament. “I’m so tired of playing Elvis Presley,” he says. My guess is that Luhrmann, like other admirers, is so embarrassed by the sight of such doldrums that he wants to get ’em over with and sail on. Is he right?

Not entirely. Not if you follow the money. To ignore Elvis as a commercial machine, in his earning power as in his fabled spending, is to clean up the myth of the man, and to parse the box-office returns for 1961, noting that Elvis’s “Blue Hawaii” made more than “Judgment at Nuremberg” (and, indeed, more than “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), is to inch your way into the America of the time. The Mississippi Midas, who grew up as a mother-loving only child, of lowly stock, had somehow wound up here , crooning to his ukulele; it was a miracle of transfiguration, and who wouldn’t buy into that? Elvis’s movies are, among other things, a showcase of his manners, and that eager courtesy, too, is a selling point. Of the blazing affair that he had with Ann-Margret, when they made “ Viva Las Vegas ” (1964), all that survives in the film are sparks of merriment. He is flattened rather than deepened by the range of his paper-thin roles—cowboy, racecar driver, frogman, pilot, or, in “Tickle Me” (1965), a rodeo rider at an all-female ranch—and he appears to be physically airbrushed by the sheen of the screen. That is why Andy Warhol based a series of silvery prints on a still from “Flaming Star,” a 1960 Western, in which Elvis is posed as a gunslinger. His revolver is aimed toward us, and, if it’s loaded, it’s full of blanks.

All of which, to those who sensed the explosive charge of the earlier Elvis, is a travesty, a tragedy, and a kind of creative death. Greil Marcus, in his majestic essay “ Elvis: Presliad ,” refers to “the all-but-complete assimilation of a revolutionary musical style into the mainstream of American culture, where no one is challenged and no one is threatened.” The question is whether Luhrmann’s “Elvis” feeds that continuing process of absorption or strives to hold out against it. The film certainly looks provocative enough, with the camera refusing to sit still, the credits dripping with bling, and the Ferris wheel dissolving into the spinning label of a 45. Now and then, Luhrmann cheerfully slices up the frame like someone making a banana split. But aesthetic mischief, however hyperactive, is not the same as risk, and, given how the movie shies away from sex and drugs (we see a rattling handful of pills, hardly the pharmaceutical candy store of legend), what hope is there for rock and roll?

Well, there are flickers of danger in Austin Butler’s Elvis, as he advances to the brink of the stage, at a Memphis ballpark, and stokes the hysteria of the throng. (Parker is so alarmed that he summons the cops.) For the most part, though, what Butler brings out is the charm of the character, with his Hawaii-blue eyes, and his compliant lightness of heart. I didn’t quite believe in the tears that he sheds after his mother dies; on the other hand, the ease with which he embarks on rehearsals at the International Hotel, making nice to his thirty-piece band and to his backing singers, the Sweet Inspirations, rings joyfully true. He tickles us, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In short, on the spectrum of those who have sought to incarnate Elvis, Butler belongs at the tender end—far from Kurt Russell, with his tough hide, in John Carpenter’s “ Elvis ” (1979), or from Nicolas Cage, who teams up with a club of skydiving Elvis look-alikes in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992), and whose whole career has been like a set of variations on the theme of Elvis. (For good measure, Cage also married Lisa Marie, Elvis’s daughter, though not for long.) But let’s face it: the first and the best Elvis impersonator was Elvis himself, and everybody who has played him since, on film and elsewhere, has just added another layer to the palimpsest, and thus to the meaning of the man. There is no ur-Elvis hiding below. We dream of being those folks who tuned in to Dewey Phillips’s slot on WHBQ, in July, 1954, and heard the King sing for the first time, and felt the ground shift beneath our feet; but we can never go back. That’s the way it is. ♦

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Pop Culture Happy Hour

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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.

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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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Watch Elvis with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

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.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Baz Luhrmann

Austin Butler

Elvis Presley

Colonel Tom Parker

Helen Thomson

Richard Roxburgh

Vernon Presley

Olivia DeJonge

Priscilla Presley

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In ‘Elvis,’ Baz Luhrmann brilliantly floods our senses with arresting sights and sounds

The director’s trademark razzle-dazzle surrounds tom hanks as an oily colonel tom parker and austin butler, electrifying as the king..

“Elvis” star Austin Butler plays the singer in every stage of his career, starting with the hip-swiveling rocker who made the girls swoon.

Warner Bros.

The numbers vary from Internet source to Internet source, but the general consensus seems to be there were something like 200 Elvis Presley impersonators in the world at the time of the King’s death in 1977 and the number has grown to at least 35,000 today. And we’re not even including all the actors who have portrayed Elvis on TV and in the movies, from Kurt Russell to Jonathan Rhys Meyers to David Keith to Don Johnson to Harvey Keitel to Michael Shannon to Val Kilmer as the Elvis apparition who advises Christian Slater’s Clarence in “True Romance.”

So one can’t help but ask: With every chapter of the man’s life and times already so deeply etched into the pop culture landscape, do we really need another movie about the man and the myth and the legend that was Elvis Presley?

In the case of “Elvis,” the answer is a resounding YES, thanks to the gloriously excessive, razzle-dazzle direction of Baz Luhrmann (“Romeo + Juliet,” “Moulin Rouge!”), a smoldering star turn performance from Austin Butler as the title character and a sure-to-be-polarizing but fantastically eccentric spin on Colonel Tom Parker, courtesy of a nearly unrecognizable Tom Hanks. This is 2 hours and 39 minutes of screen-popping, candy-colored, highly stylized, fever-dream showmanship that serves as a Greatest Hits compilation touching on the many, many permutations of Elvis, from malleable country bumpkin to sex symbol icon to B-movie star to seemingly irrelevant near has-been to the Comeback King to Las Vegas icon to his death at the age of 42, and it’s such a sprawling, amazing rollercoaster ride that it’s difficult to process the fact Presley has been dead longer than he was with us.

If you thought the magnificently flamboyant Luhrmann was well-suited to put the flashiest of spins on “The Great Gatsby,” you can imagine what he does with the made-for-overkill mythology of Elvis — and from the moment we see a bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. Pictures logo, we know Luhrmann is going to flood our senses with a nonstop medley of arresting sights and sounds, never taking his foot off the directorial gas pedal. (Who wants to see a version of Elvis unplugged, am I right?)

“Elvis” is told through the skewed, self-serving, huckster’s perspective of Colonel Tom Parker, who was not a colonel and was born Andreas Cornelis van Kujik in the Netherlands (hence the strange Dutch/Southern hybrid accent), an admittedly great showman and promoter who latched onto Presley early on and rode his show pony into the ground, allegedly bilking Presley of millions and maneuvering him into making all sorts of deals that benefitted Parker first and Presley a distant second. Parker keeps trying to convince us he’s not the villain in the story, as he we see him always lurking backstage, always making side deals to line his pockets or cover his gambling debts, always in the middle of everything while looking out for himself first, always spinning things with his almost cartoonishly evil cadence.

Tom Hanks is nearly unrecognizable as Elvis’ wheeler-dealer of a manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Luhrmann employs a sparkling array of visual and aural tactics, from period-piece graphics to sepia-toned flashbacks, from nostalgic color schemes to swooping camera movements to split screens and cool and creative match-cut transitions. We know Elvis didn’t write his own material and we know he appropriated the sounds of gospel and blues from Black artists, and perhaps more than any previous Presley biopic, “Elvis” continually acknowledges that, with the likes of BB King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey) getting their moments.

Still, the film’s fate rests on the shoulders of Austin Butler, who flashed serious movie-star potential as the evil fool Tex Watson in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and is mesmerizingly strong here. Butler doesn’t do an Elvis impersonation, but he does a stunningly good job of capturing the hip-swiveling, pink-suited Elvis who makes girls swoon and scream in a comedically effective early sequence; the ’60s Elvis who starred in a series of forgettable and dopey movies; the brilliant performer who made one of the most memorable pop-star comebacks of all time in a 1968 TV special, and the lost and borderline self-parodying Karate King who sweated and toiled on the Vegas stage and only occasionally touched greatness. Butler is an electric performer who shines in the spotlight when Elvis is onstage, but he also infuses Presley with an empathetic humanity and vulnerability. We know the man was hardly a saint, but we understand his sins.

Hanks’ characterization of Colonel Tom Parker is a big swing for someone who has held the unofficial title of America’s Most Likable Movie Star for more than 30 years. Some might argue he’s miscast, but I found the performance to be suitably oily, for despite Parker’s protestations, he IS the villain of the story. Even as Parker constantly reminds us that he “made” Elvis Presley (and there’s an element of truth to that), we see that time and again, he also contributed to the destruction of the man.

Still, for all its tragic elements and the heartbreak of an ending we know is coming, “Elvis” is a brilliant celebration of an artist who left a lasting and huge footprint on our culture.

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‘Elvis’ vs. Elvis

How much do fantasy and imagination play into how we remember pop culture heroes.

Hosted by Jon Caramanica. Produced by Pedro Rosado.

Subscribe to Popcast! Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher

The Baz Luhrmann biopic “Elvis” has been one of this summer’s box office success stories, demonstrating the ongoing appetite for stories about Elvis Presley, one of pop music’s dynamic and contentious figures, as well as the cinematic power of Luhrmann’s vivid, overwhelming style, which is optimized for the big screen.

The film is loyal to Presley ( Austin Butler ), and uses his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as a narrator and also a moral foil. It emphasizes Presley as a performer and cultural agitator more so than as a person, while combining or rewriting historical moments to serve the larger narrative.

On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Presley’s career, how the film smooths out the rough edges of his story, and the role that fantasy and imagination play in remembering pop culture heroes.

A.O. Scott, co-chief film critic of The New York Times

Alanna Nash, author of “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley,” “Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him” and several other books

Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel . We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected] . Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica .

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Elvis review: Tasteful restraint has left the building

Film review: baz luhrmann’s biopic doesn’t so much win you over as hammer you into submission.

Austin Butler as Elvis. Photograph: PA

There is a stubborn contradiction at the heart of Baz Luhrmann’s characteristically unrestrained take on the life of Elvis Aaron Presley. The film’s reasonable premise is that Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks blinking through layers of latex), the Dutch-born carnival huckster who managed the King from 1956, lured a raw talent away from his soulful roots and forced him into a more artificial, less angular school of pure showbusiness. The problem here is that latter world is very much Luhrmann’s own. There is plenty of Vegas-era Elvis in his Romeo + Juliet, The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge! You will search in vain for flavours of the Sun Studios-era Presley in his work.

Right from the beginning of Elvis! (okay, the title doesn’t take the Moulin Rouge! exclamation point, but it seems implied) we are drowning beneath the brassy glitz that characterised the singer’s later work. Early scenes see him happening upon gospel music while wearing Captain Marvel’s lightning flash round his neck. Every surface is cleanly wiped. Every fabric seems fresh out of the box. There is no journey to Vegas. We are essentially there from the opening scene. The rapidly cut noise and bustle reminds us that Luhrmann sees all films as musicals and all musicals as camp assault. Elvis!! (sorry) doesn’t so much win you over as hammer you into submission. It dumps you into a sealed drum, blasts hysterically re-edited versions of the familiar music into that sealed space and rattles it furiously until you pass out or — ears bleeding — give in to the benevolent torture and confess everything.

Actors other than Hanks and Austin Butler — dealt an impossible hand in the lead role — appear, but the surrounding beach assault all but drowns them out. (If I could remember anything about Olivia DeJonge’s Priscilla I would have let you know.) Presented as something between Orson Welles in Touch of Evil and an eccentrically accented, ambulatory slag heap, Hanks savours casting against his usual type. He licks his lips. His eyes are, for all we can tell, rolling dramatically beneath the prosthetics. Nobody with a brain in their skulls will rate this among his finest performances, but neither could anyone pretend that the great man is coasting. It probably wasn’t worth his becoming the first celebrity Covid patient, but his Colonel Tom sticks in the brain like chewing gum sticks in hair.

Butler has charisma, good looks and rock‘n’roll chops. Unfortunately, the indelible memory of the real thing never allows his thinly drawn character to breathe. He is, however, at home in ways neither actor nor director can have desired. Elvis!!! is shot largely in Luhrmann’s native Australia. It looks as hot as Tennessee. The scrubland seems as dusty. But it feels no more like the real thing than Butler feels like Elvis Presley.

Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis

For all that, Elvis!!!! may still be Luhrmann’s least irritating project since Moulin Rouge! It is certainly more in control of itself than his deafening The Great Gatsby (tinnitus still lingers from 2013). Nobody unfamiliar with Presley’s transcendent early recordings for Sun — simultaneously raw and tight — will find any enlightenment here as to why they became so influential. Happening before Parker’s arrival, those sessions are raced through in a perfunctory buzz. But the longer the film goes on and the closer we get to the Vegas years, the more appropriate Luhrmann’s split-screen carpet-bombing seems. Shot in rolling swoops by Mandy Walker, and edited in galloping hiccups by Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond, the later sequences make a virtue of their own diamante vulgarity. The viewer may struggle with the continuing inconsistency — the film is more comfortable with the supposedly compromised Elvis than the barely seen roots artist — but the audience is, at least, propelled back into the street in something like an elevated mood.

That is what Baz does. He gives you Baz. A whole bucket of Baz.

Donald Clarke

Donald Clarke, a contributor to The Irish Times, is Chief Film Correspondent and a regular columnist

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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan.

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The strength of Universal Studios is its constraints. This is a theme park set in a working movie studio. While that means space is at a premium, it creates a lively, “only in SoCal” energy that no other theme park can match.

Every ride at Disneyland, ranked

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