On July 31, 1969, Elvis Presley first took the stage at the International Hotel in Vegas, still at the height of his 1968 electric TV special, which had revived his grueling career.
What was originally conceived as a four-week stay at the hotel – a brand new $60 million development and then the largest in the world – was to culminate in a seven-year period, concluding the final chapter of Presley’s tragically cut short career, the theater witnessed his descent into a state of narcotic, rhinestone-encrusted stupor.
But it had started so well: The huge theater and budget for the blue sky production had inspired Elvis to put together a show that reached new heights of kitschy extravagance.
It’s certainly this Vegas-era Elvis—the jumpsuit-clad crooner, padded and decked out and accompanied by backing singers, a band, and a 40-piece orchestra—who called Baz Luhrmann, himself an inveterate showman with a bowerbird eye for things that glitter. and shine, and especially things that can break.
Collectively, his films carry the thesis that the greatest heartbreak is reserved for the most beautiful people – and who could be more beautiful than the strange, pompadourous boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, with a voice like melting butter and those impossibly voluptuous hips?
With Elvis, Luhrmann—whose last film used one of the signature works of American literature as its source material (The Great Gatsby, 2016), and the film before that, the mythos of this entire nation (Australia, 2012)—gives the old bazzle-dazzle to what is arguably his most iconic subject to date.
Because Elvis Presley’s story is nothing short of the story of rock and roll, from the slums and steamy nightclubs of the American South to prime-time national television.
And Luhrmann takes it all courageously in his kaleidoscopic movement: with his often hyperactive camera work, the film plays like a 159-minute musical rollercoaster ride through Elvis’s 42 years. You run the risk of being completely shaken up, if not by tenderness, then possibly by motion sickness.
In the king’s blue suede shoes (well, two-tone) is Austin Butler, a blue-eyed Californian whose previous credits are mostly limited to teeny-tiny TV. A relative unknown, he’s capable of slipping into the role in a way that a bigger player (like Michael Shannon, who plays a paranoid, lonely king in 2016’s Elvis & Nixon, for example) couldn’t – if not in the same mate as the enigmatic Michael St. Gerard, whose uncanny resemblance to Presley saw him cast in the role multiple times in the late 80s and early 90s.
Like Kurt Russell, the one-time Disney teen idol who starred in John Carpenter’s 1979 television movie Elvis, Butler puts on a performance that should give him access to the pantheon of hot young stars on the silver screen, as the sweet, soulful center of this Wonka-esque confection.
And it’s only fitting that Elvis makes the star and not the other way around. Even if his name no longer carries the weight it once did, there’s no denying that he wielded an influence that would be unimaginable in today’s shattered pop-cultural landscape. There couldn’t be a bigger name on the poster than “Elvis”.
Less camouflaged, despite being wrapped in prosthetics, is Tom Hanks, who defeats him in a rare villainous role: the shady former carnie named Colonel Tom Parker is, as he crows in his voice over the narration, “the man who gave the world Elvis Presley”.
He could also just be the man who killed him—not directly, but through the escalating demands he would make of his client, and then by securing his entry into the pharmacopoeia which, at least for a time, would allow for Elvis to meet those demands.
In his time as an afterthought, before moving on to managing musical talent, the Colonel (as he tells us) specialized in the kinds of attractions that evoked feelings that the gamblers “were not sure if they should enjoy”. The screams that involuntarily come from all the girls as young Elvis shakes his hips on stage – “Well, that’s good, Mommy,” he draws – tell Tom Parker that this kid has an act he can do something with; here was “the biggest carnival attraction” he had ever seen.
The story unfolds — in a prismatic fashion, dizzyingly back and forth in time — nominally from the Colonel’s perspective: his incendiary narration is a plea for absolution, though scene after scene condemns him.
The film’s sideways look at the subject evokes Citizen Kane, arguably the definitive portrayal of the process of turning wild success into loneliness and narcissism. Like Kane, whose last utterance of “rosebud” confused even those closest to him, Butler’s Elvis – Luhrmann’s Elvis – ultimately remains elusive; a larger-than-life figure who can only be known through so many layers of mediation – through his gold sunglasses and the camera lens.
“This isn’t a nostalgic show,” Butler’s Elvis tells the musicians gathered on the international stage during rehearsal, and they launch an amplified, flower-laden version of Arthur Crudup’s debut song That’s All Right. single 16 years earlier. (Crudup appears in the film played by Gary Clark Jr., his sultry blues an illicit thrill for the adolescent Elvis, played by Chaydon Jay.)
Unsurprisingly, Luhrmann’s Elvis isn’t a nostalgic show either — after all, the film is stamped with the gold badge of the man who dressed Romeo in an aloha shirt and sang a fin de siècle French courtesan Elton John.
The musical anachronism that felt blatant in The Great Gatsby, a story that is to some extent about taste, plays better here – and I say this as someone who felt a twinge of dread at the sight of the words “Edge of Reality (Tame Impala Remix)” on the soundtrack list.
It works in part because there’s an observable logic behind the more outré songs: Doja Cat’s Vegas, woven into a black nightlife scene on Memphis’ Beale Street, gives Hound Dog back to Big Mama Thornton, the first artist to record the song. (played on screen by Shonka Dukureh); Eminem’s The King and I, while limited to the credits, draws a line between two white artists who grew up in a black environment and who used a black idiom.
But it’s also because Elvis himself, once a boy with “greasy hair” and “girly makeup” who dreamed of buying a hot pink Cadillac, always defied good taste. In his landmark 1968 TV special, he laid out a… musical number in a brothel between a gospel medley and a “kung fu spectacular”† The king did not discriminate – and it is precisely for this reason that he came to define rock ‘n’ roll.
Luhrmann is no Elvis Presley, but you have to like a spicy imitation.
Elvis hits theaters on June 23.
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