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‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life

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

By A.O. Scott

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

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

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

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

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

It wouldn’t entirely be a mistake. The central plot casts Elvis (Austin Butler) as the victim of a powerful and devious bloodsucking fiend. That would be Col. Tom Parker, who supplies voice-over narration and is played by Tom Hanks with a mountain of prosthetic goo, a bizarre accent and a yes-it’s-really-me twinkle in his eyes. Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.

“I didn’t kill Elvis,” Parker says, though the movie implies otherwise. “I made Elvis.” In the Colonel’s mind, they were “the showman and the snowman,” equal partners in a supremely lucrative long con.

Luhrmann’s last feature was an exuberant, candy-colored — and, I thought, generally underrated — adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” and the Colonel is in some ways a Gatsbyesque character. He’s a self-invented man, an arriviste on the American scene, a “mister nobody from nowhere” trading in the unstable currencies of wishing and seeming. He isn’t a colonel (Elvis likes to call him “admiral”) and his real name isn’t Tom Parker. The mystery of his origins is invoked to sinister effect but not fully resolved. If we paid too much attention to him, he might take over the movie, something that almost happens anyway.

Luhrmann seems more interested in the huckster than in the artist. But he himself is the kind of huckster who understands the power of art, and is enough of an artist to make use of that power.

As a Presley biography, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. The basic stuff is all there, as it would be on Wikipedia. Elvis is haunted by the death of his twin brother, Jesse, and devoted to his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Relations with his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are more complicated. The boy grows up poor in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, finds his way into the Sun Records recording studio at the age of 19, and proceeds to set the world on fire. Then there’s the Army, marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), Hollywood, a comeback broadcast in 1968, a long residency in Las Vegas, divorce from Priscilla and the sad, bloated spectacle of his last years.

Butler is fine in the few moments of offstage drama that the script allows, but most of the emotional action is telegraphed in Luhrmann’s usual emphatic, breathless style. The actor seems most fully Elvis — as Elvis, the film suggests, was most truly himself — in front of an audience. Those hips don’t lie, and Butler captures the smoldering physicality of Elvis the performer, as well as the playfulness and vulnerability that drove the crowds wild. The voice can’t be imitated, and the movie wisely doesn’t try, remixing actual Elvis recordings rather than trying to replicate them.

At his first big performance, in a dance hall in Texarkana, Ark., where he shares a bill with Hank Snow (David Wenham), Snow’s son, Jimmie (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and other country acts, Elvis steps out in a bright pink suit, heavy eye makeup and glistening pompadour. A guy in the audience shouts a homophobic slur, but after a few bars that guy’s date and every other woman in the room is screaming her lungs out, “having feelings she’s not sure she should enjoy,” as the Colonel puts it. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. Elvis is a modern Orpheus, and these maenads are about to tear him to pieces. In another scene, back in Memphis, Elvis watches Little Richard (Alton Mason) tearing up “Tutti Frutti” (a song he would later cover) and sees a kindred spirit.

The sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity of early rock ’n’ roll is very much in Luhrmann’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Its racial complications less so. “Elvis” puts its hero in the presence of Black musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who offers career advice. An early montage — repeated so often that it becomes a motif — finds the boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay) simultaneously peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) plays “That’s All Right Mama” and catching the spirit at a tent revival.

There’s no doubt that Elvis, like many white Southerners of his class and generation, loved blues and gospel. (He loved country and western, too, a genre the film mostly dismisses.) He also profited from the work of Black musicians and from industry apartheid, and a movie that won’t grapple with the dialectic of love and theft that lies at the heart of American popular music can’t hope to tell the whole story.

In the early days, Elvis’s nemesis is the segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland (Nicholas Bell), whose fulminations against sex, race-mixing and rock ’n’ roll are intercut with a galvanic performance of “Trouble.” Later, Elvis is devastated by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed “just three miles from Graceland”) and Robert F. Kennedy. These moments, which try to connect Elvis with the politics of his era, are really episodes in his relationship with Colonel Parker, who wants to keep his cash cow away from controversy.

When Elvis defies the Colonel — breaking out in full hip-shaking gyrations when he’s been told “not to wiggle so much as a finger”; turning a network Christmas special into a sweaty, intimate, raucous return to form — the movie wants us to see his conscience at work, as well as his desire for creative independence. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight.

And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood. His relationships with Vernon, Priscilla and the entourage known as “the Memphis mafia” receive cursory treatment. His appetites for food, sex and drugs barely get that much.

Who was he? The movie doesn’t provide much of an answer. But younger viewers, whose firsthand experience of the King is even thinner than mine, might come away from “Elvis” with at least an inkling of why they should care. In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.

Like a lot of people who write about American popular culture — or who just grew up in the second half of the 20th century — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elvis. “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to him, as if for the first time.

Elvis Rated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Cannes 2022: Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, Moonage Daydream

Musical films have always had a home at Cannes. From concert films to biopics to rock docs, these are often a respite from the slow-burn art cinema that occupies much of the slate. Jacques Demy 's masterful film " The Umbrellas of Cherbourg " remains the only true musical to take the Palme d'or—though, technically, it received the first Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, joining the likes of magnificent films like Altman's "MASH," Coppola's " The Conversation ," Antonioni's " Blow-Up " (with the Yardbirds playing a prominent role!) during a 10-year period when the top prize of the fest was changed.

A few years ago " Rocketman " had a splash premiere, complete with Elton John and the film's star Taron Egerton serenading the black-tie crowd in the Grand Lumière. Having just walked down the beach to arrive at my press screening of that film, I had the most surreal experience of realizing that the "I'm Still Standing" video that is mirrored in the film's climax was shot on the very path that I strode, images I'd seen since early childhood now retroactively made sense of as I recognized the Carlton Hotel's beachside strip.

Rob Reiner was in town this year to show " This is Spinal Tap " on the beach to an appreciative public crowd, and it was tied in part to the announcement that a sequel of sorts in the works. I, for one, cannot wait to take another bite of that shark sandwich. Meanwhile, the 4K restoration of " Singin' in the Rain " played at the Agnès Varda theatre, a slight downgrade in screen size from the usual Warner Bros. Showcase where I saw likes of " Unforgiven ," " 2001: A Space Odyssey ," and " The Shining " on the superior Debussy setup.

Speaking of WB, their splashy contribution to this year's fest was Baz Luhrmann 's ecstatic " Elvis ." From the opening shots you know you're being thrust into one of Luhrmann's kinetic film worlds, with diamond-encrusted logos spinning in kaleidoscopic fashion and the music thumping away. While not quite as narratively sophisticated as "Rocketman," "Elvis" does well to surpass the schlocky stereotypes and tabloid fodder to try and get to the heart of the man and his music. Similarly, his relationship with the mercurial Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks uttering a Dutch-inflected Southern drawl that's both impressively precise and will be off-putting to many.

Yet it's Austin Butler 's uncanny Elvis that's truly the center of the show. His physicality is extraordinary, going beyond the regular impersonator vibe and seemingly inhabiting the man both in terms of his charisma as well as his extraordinary physical presence. The way Elvis' music is messed with proves beneficial, reminding younger listeners especially of the explosive urgency that the vintage recordings may not achieve for those who have had such moments of experimentation and genre-blending baked into 75 years of rock 'n' roll's evolution. I compare it to how David Milch uses filthwords in "Deadwood," amplifying language of contemporary impact to elucidate how these things felt at the time.

Yes, "Elvis" is about a singular figure, but more than that it's a celebration of a particular time of musical expression, when the entirety of Presley's own musical gaze was firmly placed upon gospel, country, blues, and other music whose delineation would only become further solidified by the institutions of recording and transmission. Luhrmann's trademark mash-ups remind us that the barriers are arbitrary if not counterproductive.

The man that followed Presley's reign at Sun Records in Memphis, and whose own success was initially financed by the RCA deal that saw Sam Phillips finally able to showcase his retinue of artists on a national scale, is documented in Ethan Coen 's " Jerry Lee Lewis : Trouble in Mind " documentary. Along with his wife and editor Tricia Cooke, the two have taken archival interviews and concert performances to weave a relatively chronological overview of the man known as "Killer." The big hits are here, with clips familiar to any fan of early rock 'n' roll, but it's the other, more obscure elements, particularly from his later "country" career, that may be more of interest to long-time fans.

The film deftly interweaves these musical and interview moments, buttressed by Lewis' compunction for laying it all out when discussing his life and career with journalists. The salacious moments, including the U.K. reaction to his teenage bride, are explored directly. Similarly, his other career missteps and faltering asides are documented, including a bearded Jerry Lee talking about his upcoming role playing Christ (I, for one, would welcome a late 1970s inclusion of him in a rock musical version, but that's perhaps my own bias showing through). Coen's film a good introduction to the man, and even long-time fans should be pleased by the accessible yet interesting telling of the man's musical life.

Finally, there's Brett Morgen 's " Moonage Daydream ," a wondrous, dreamy, ambitiously experimental take on the music doc formula. Stylistically borrowing from David Bowie 's own visual and auditory output, the film dances between disparate timelines of a decades-long career, changing in mood and tone almost as often as the musical artist changed costumes.

In describing the movie I've found the easiest shorthand is to reference the last act of Kubrick's "2001," which it must be remembered became a massive box office success in part because of a promised cinematic "trip." Above all else Morgen has created a film that's to be experienced on the biggest screen possible, and my experience of sitting dead center at the Grand Théâtre Lumière during the midnight world premiere will never be forgotten.

Swirling images, animated shapes, and a wide assembly of stock imagery collide with images of Bowie drawn from concert footage, music videos, and even his own experiments with filmmaking. At times the film settles down to simply revel in a performances, with D.A. Pennebaker's justifiably revered "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" being a repeated touchstone. Yet it's the way that Morgen strips the songs down to their constituent elements that impresses the most, allowing a unique marriage of interview words and musical fragments to merge into a new, vital work scored by Bowie and his musical collaborators.

This need not be a definitive Bowie documentary that tells his full story, and I'd welcome one that would shy away from some of the more complicated aspects beyond the image he wished to present to the world. That film may come, should come, but no penalty should be accorded to this obvious celebration of the man. That being said, by allowing the contradictions to remain intact, to have Bowie essentially arguing against himself as he shifts justification or description of his art over many, many years, you at least get a glimpse under the mask of the man. You recognize like many of the pop musicians of his era that his interactions with the press were for the greater purpose of shaping his communication to an audience.

I cannot overstate how powerful an experience it was to see " Moonage Daydream " on that giant canvas, and whether you're a Bowie fanatic or simply one open to a remarkable feat of documentary filmmaking, I strongly encourage all that are able to view " Moonage Daydream " on the biggest screen possible, including the IMAX screens that are planned for the film's theatrical run. It's Bowie at his biggest, Bowie at his best, all thanks to Brett Morgen and his remarkable talent in elevating already iconic artists in ways few other filmmakers (Pennebaker a leader among them) have been able.