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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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‘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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‘Elvis’ Is Ecstatic, Jittery, Horny, Tireless, and Tragic. Just Like the King

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

It’s been a while since I felt beaten up by a movie. Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to end that lucky streak. And with a movie about Elvis Presley , no less — hardly a subject to approach casually. Elvis , in the epic tradition of all of Luhrmann’s work, is a brash, overwhelming experience. It’s a carnival in movie form: a grand, restless, swirling contraption that’s as grotesque as any bloody-mouthed geek and as uncomfortably poignant as a sad clown. It’s too much. Yet if it were any less excessive, it wouldn’t be as doggedly effective as it often is. Elvis begins at the end — not of Presley’s life, but of the life that consumed and distorted it: Colonel Thomas Parker, his longtime manager. Played by a jowly and insistently unappealing Tom Hanks , Parker is the grandmaster of the tragic spectacle to follow. He is our narrator and admonisher, the man with the megaphone and the whip. A bedridden nobody with the movie starts, Parker can barely get this story out without being haunted by his own memories, particularly of a moment when, late in Elvis’ life, the performer is practically sleepwalking from exhaustion, and Parker says, “ The only thing that matters is that that man gets up on that stage tonight .” There he is: the King (played by a sensational Austin Butler) sprawled on the ground, barely alive and being pumped with fluids so that he can be trotted out on stage like a reanimated corpse. 

It’s no wonder Parker’s narration of this story, which frames the entire movie, bears the gutless stench of a deathbed confession. Parker tells us that the death of Elvis was in large part the fault of the public’s love and adoration, its unceasing need for more , to which Elvis became as addicted as he was to the barbiturates and alcohol that spelled his certain downfall. We already know better. Colonel Parker is preparing us for a story of Elvis’ rise and fall, which is in turn the story of his own rise and fall. Man, myth, and legend are collapsed into one hip-heaving, acutely talented, blue-eyed soulster whose tragedy is preordained by the fact that his story still belongs to the man who bled it dry. If you want the usual biopic bullet points, this movie’s got them. But we should know by now that the director of Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby will not give it to us in a straight line. This is, yes, the story of Elvis’ life, from impoverished and troubled birth to premature, unglamorous death. But every stop along the way is given the weight of a totalizing, world-shaking event: Before Elvis gets big , he’s already big. His wandering into a Black church and catching the spirit as a shoeless child in Tupelo, Mississippi, rings out with the audacious grandeur of an event that will change the course of history — which, in its way, it was. Elvis hits the necessary details, carves out the storied, prominent eras in Elvis’ personal and professional life: his Beale Street era, his Hollywood era, his time in the military, his courtship of and marriage to Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), his fated run at Vegas’ International Hotel, and on and on, flashing backward to his origin and forward to the long aftermath of his death, when we meet Parker again and are forced to remember just who it is that’s telling this story. When it works, it’s contagious. We largely have Austin Butler to thank for that. How Butler survived this role, with all of its ecstatic rebounds and tireless, jittery, sweat-stained feats of performance, is a mystery. Maybe the best thing you can say about Elvis is that the movie knows what it has. Luhrmann’s movie doesn’t need an Elvis impersonator. It needs an actor who can survive the movie — who can not only stand out from Luhrmann’s heavy sensationalism, but who can also convince us that beneath all the shiny surfaces and visual outbursts, there’s a person. Butler’s Elvis is a convincing performer — you believe, quite incredibly, that this is a man people couldn’t take their eyes off of — but he’s also credibly flawed, and daring. 

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He’s also tasked with oozing sex appeal, and this works, too. Elvis is an incredibly horny movie. It has to be. You aren’t getting this story right if we cannot believe that the man’s hip-shaking was worthy of his being labeled a public enemy. Luhrmann of course has to drive the point home with energetic tastelessness, dialing up the ooh’s and aah’s until they resemble outright orgasms. Butler’s job is to make that plausible: He has to meet Luhrmann blow for blow. The movie’s makeup and costuming team gives him a deft assist, caking him in sweat as thick as motor oil when he’s performing and squeezing him into criminally tight jeans meant to get the imagination going. In the end, it’s still up to Butler to do all of this and give Luhrmann’s style the soul it needs to make it all make sense. 

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Elvis is an entertaining movie about the man’s sex appeal and a pretty good movie about his life, even as it never dials things back enough for anyone to catch a breath. Luhrmann’s zigzagging, triumphantly kitschy style suits his subject. But a movie about Elvis made on this scale, even by a director like Luhrmann, whose work isn’t immediately recognizable as political, is saddled with other responsibilities. This is, after all, a story inseparable from the history and public sentiment that surrounded Presley. That includes the political efforts to ban him, but it also includes the attitudes behind those efforts — the Black styles and sounds that made even the white Elvis threatening. He’s credited with a sexual awakening among young people, it’s true, but he was also a vehicle for Black music finding its way onto white radio stations, Black movement slipping into white living rooms. 

Maybe unsurprisingly, then, Elvis puts more than a little effort into settling the matter of Elvis and race — Elvis and Black musicians, that is. It starts with that early memory of him slipping into Black spaces as a child and being caught up in the music that he would grow to love. It puts some of his most famous songs — Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” for example — back into the mouths of the Black musicians who first wrote them. It situates Elvis the man as an appreciator of that music, a joyous recipient and beneficiary, not the thief many have claimed him to be over the years. Elvis the legend, meanwhile, becomes inseparable from the music he loved. Even the movie’s engagement with the history and politics of Elvis’ moment seems to come back to this. We get news of the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK, as we must. But in that last case, what registers more urgently is Mahalia Jackson’s performance at the fallen civil rights leader’s funeral — a curious moment that starts with the funeral telecast playing in the background of Elvis and Priscilla bickering (yet again) before Mahalia’s voice catches Elvis’ attention. What arises after this is the era of Elvis getting back to his roots, in a way, juggling the need to make political statements, as his performances in defiance of obscenity laws plainly did, with his desire to play it safe and stay out of it. B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), and Mahalia Jackson (Cle Morgan) flow into and out of this movie with an ease that amounts to more than inspiration for Elvis. They’re seen performing at length, with Elvis often watching; by the time he performs the covers of Black music that would come to define his career, we’ve already been educated on the source. Even a couple of the needle-drops sprinkled throughout modernize Elvis’ tunes by way of hip hop and other styles that point back to Black music, just as, in the movie’s depiction, Elvis openly points back to that music. This doesn’t quite amount to a confrontation with the problem at hand, which isn’t only a matter of theft or inspiration, but of profit. On this subject, the movie imbues its throng of legendary Black musicians with world-weary understanding. It underestimates their anger, more invested in Elvis’ appreciation of them. Whether that’s a useful trade-off will depend on us. Elvis is in many ways, about “us” — the people out there in the crowd that the King, in his International Hotel performances, would make a point of gazing back at, turning up the house lights to give faces to the anonymous throng of superfans staring up at him in the dark. It’s another of the more effective threads in this movie — Elvis’ relationship to the masses. Luhrmann’s movies are overripe with basic scenes that seem to have been shredded and put back together by a madman with a poisoned genius for finding ecstasy in even the smallest things. Watching Elvis feels a little like being electrocuted. But as a document of the loving masses, and of the thrill of seeing Elvis perform, this is all apt. As is the central tragedy of the film. In the end, we’re back in that hospital room with Parker, hearing the full, winding arc of his choice to sell out his and Elvis’ souls. He grafted both of their fates into a contract that would render Parker into both Faust and the devil and Elvis into a dying machine, performing to his last breath with the helplessness of a man who seems to have no choice, but whose fatigue never dulled his love for giving all he had to give. It’s an exhausting movie. That probably means that it’s doing something right.

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Elvis Reviews

Luhrmann overlooks a lot of the horrible things that happened during his legacy to create a version that is worthy of the big screen.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

There is no doubt in my mind that Elvis is a fine tribute that many fans won't regret watching, but it just gets in its own way and doesn't manage to stand as an exceptional one.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2023

The film gets in its way but is a good start for Butler’s growing career.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

The triumph of Elvis comes in the form of lead actor Austin Butler, who embodies the King from start to finish. Butler's performance brings life to an often cartoonish man, selling his soul to director Baz Luhrmann's trademark flash and flair.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Elvis is a strong effort from everyone involved, and is worth watching for Butler alone; he is a star. It's a wild ride that will undoubtedly provide fun, laughter and toe-tapping happiness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

Colonel Parker describes Elvis as “the greatest show on earth.” If Butler’s performance manages to capture even an ounce of Elvis’ magic, Colonel Parker might just have been right.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Austin Butler stars in a sensory experience so flashy and grandiose that it can only be described by the feeling it evokes: nausea.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 21, 2023

It also shows Luhrmann continuing to swing for the fences. His "Elvis" captures the enormity of this pop culture phenomenon, with enough chutzpah to overcome the bumps in the road.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Here’s the key problem: there are effectively two films playing out at the same time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Apr 12, 2023

There’s just no reason for its nearly 160-minute runtime; but the music is fantastic.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 31, 2023

Butler here is a co-auteur in a way usually closed to biopics in which the lead actors are more famous than Butler is, and so we never lose them in their roles as other famous people.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Another flat one sided look at a rock idol that’s never bold enough to challenge our perceptions of them.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2023

Rarely do we see a performance that is so electric that as soon as the film gets over, one rushes to search about the actor instead.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

A dazzling opulence of color, set design, and musical presentations.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 24, 2023

Butler’s explosive interpretation of Elvis – from the physical gesticulations to the big, burly voice – humanized The King, pulling down the bright lights to show us the distressed man behind the immortal God of Rock.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2023

...a disappointing misfire that squanders its host of appealing attributes.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 7, 2023

The story of the King has been told many times, but nothing like Baz Luhrmann's sensational, impressionistic take on Elvis Presley (played with pitch-perfect resonance by an explosively charismatic Austin Butler).

Full Review | Jan 3, 2023

Austin Butler blew us all away as Elvis and still is.

Full Review | Dec 27, 2022

Elvis has one of the best lead performances this year from Austin Butler. The singing, the set design, the recreation of iconic moments, and the engaging performances are insane! Hanks plays one of the most despising characters he's ever attempted also!

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

Let’s just give Austin Butler his Best Actor Oscar now. This young man has range to spare. Wow!

Full Review | Original Score: FIVE STARS | Dec 21, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 24, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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• 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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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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Elvis (2022)

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• The elvis songs
• Terrible pacing and editing. The first half of the movie gave me nausea it felt like everything was going at supersonic speed and the second half was much slower.
• Tom hanks was simply miscasted. Sorry but his fake dutch accent is not believable at all and its simply annoying to listen to. He should not have been in this movie. Also it felt like he was the main character and Elvis was a side character in his own movie. Tom hanks had too much screen time and his performance was quite bad.
• modern trap rap songs in a film about Elvis Presley seriously?? What is wrong with the people who made this film? I simply dont understand the choice of some of the songs.

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

David ehrlich.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Elvis review – Baz Luhrmann’s squeaky-clean King is shaking no one up

Incurious yet frantic, Luhrmann’s spangly epic is off-key – and Austin Butler flounders in those blue suede shoes

B az Luhrmann has given us another pointless explosion of super-spangly sparkles in celluloid form – exactly the same sparkles he sprinkled over the Moulin Rouge and Jay Gatsby in previous films. And just as Alan Partridge said his favourite Beatles album was The Best of the Beatles, so Luhrmann has given us a film built around what he imagines is the best of Elvis Presley.

It’s not a movie so much as a 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace. At the end of it all, you might find yourself pondering the eternal questions: what does Luhrmann think of Elvis’s music? Does he, for example, prefer some Elvis songs to others? Has he listened to any of Elvis’s songs all the way through? Or does he shut down Spotify after 20 seconds once he reckons he’s got the gist?

These issues arise because of the weirdly incurious approach here to Presley’s music and his life, featuring a competent but not especially inspired performance from Austin Butler as the pelvis-swivelling, American-youth-deranging King himself. The film really wastes its one potential trump card: a human toad performance from Tom Hanks as his creepy and parasitic manager Colonel Tom Parker, who exploited him ruthlessly and refused to let him tour abroad, finally turning him into a bloated rhinestone parody in an unending cash-cow Vegas residency while the rest of the world moved on. (The soundtrack absolutely hammers the “caught in a trap” line from Suspicious Minds in case we miss the point.)

But Luhrmann is clearly unwilling or unable to explore the dysfunctional Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship between the Colonel and Elvis in case any sort of dark or sad mood predominates. Colonel Tom is a kind of repeating cameo in Elvis’s life and Luhrmann is even less interested in Parker’s inner self than in Elvis’s – the Colonel’s own wretched post-Elvis life and death are shrugged off in the closing credit titles.

We get the basics of Presley’s career: the early days of hardship, the profound influence of black music, the blues and gospel; his days on the hayseed country circuit before signing for Parker, the huge Elvismania success, the shrewd decision to calm moral-majority fears by doing two years military service in Germany, marriage to Priscilla, the bubblegum movies, the televised 1968 Comeback Special and the long Vegas goodbye.

There are some tiny unpredictable touches – such as a hint that Elvis secretly inflamed young gay men in the States as well as straight women. But otherwise it sticks to a defanged version of the script. There is, for example, not really any such thing as Fat Elvis here. He stays sweaty but reasonably svelte until almost the very end, when we see a decorous hint of flab. But we don’t see the yucky burger binges or the adult diapers. Luhrmann is at all times concerned to rescue Elvis from irony and failure and suffering.

And how about that legendary encounter with the one US president that Elvis really did admire – Richard Nixon – when the King was cordially received in 1970 at the White House because he demanded presidential action on the country’s infatuation with degenerate lefties like the Beatles? Nothing. That isn’t shown.

This version of Elvis, with retrofitted liberal sensitivities, is always breaking off what he’s doing to look stunned at the TV reporting the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, and to be soulfully devastated at the loss of these American icons. Well … maybe. But the film erases his actual Republican sympathies. Also erased, as it happens, is Ann-Margret, his Viva Las Vegas co-star, with whom he had a poignant, illicit relationship for about a year.

Why do the film at all? The rationale would appear to be – and might in earlier versions of the script have been – the poisonous bromance or toxic father-son relationship between Parker and Presley. But how about a film about the Colonel, with Elvis taking a secondary role? That would have been genuinely new and Hanks would have sold it superbly. As it is, this is just another exercise in Elvis impersonation, its upper lip twitching to no purpose.

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
• Cannes 2022
• Cannes film festival
• Elvis Presley
• Baz Luhrmann
• Period and historical films

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Snazzy music biopic doesn't go deep enough; drugs, smoking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

When you find something that inspires you, it can

As depicted here, Elvis Presley was a well-meaning

The Black musicians who influenced Elvis make many

Death threats/aggressive fans. A concert riot show

Kissing. Sensual dancing. Sex is implied through i

Language includes: "goddamn," "hell," "a--hole," "

Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Cadillac are seen and refere

Pill-popping, morphine use, and needles -- as well

Parents need to know that Elvis is writer-director Baz Luhrmann's visually stylish musical biopic about The King of Rock 'n' Roll. As told through the perspective of Elvis' longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), it spends a lot of time on Presley's (Austin Butler) launch into superstardom, the…

Positive Messages

When you find something that inspires you, it can change your life. Be careful about who you trust. Art and music are very powerful.

Positive Role Models

As depicted here, Elvis Presley was a well-meaning person who cared very much about those he loved and didn't let racism impact who he was or who he spent time with. He's a devoted son who treats those around him with respect. But drug abuse and unrelenting expectations eventually destroy him. He cheats while in committed relationships, falls under the sway of Col. Tom Parker, and suffers from self doubt. Parker is portrayed as a selfish, manipulative puppet master who didn't really care about anything other than himself. Priscilla is shown as smart and caring.

Diverse Representations

The Black musicians who influenced Elvis make many appearances in the supporting cast -- as does their struggle to achieve mainstream notice despite having immense talent. Elvis finds his way to music through a religious experience at a Black church and is depicted as feeling most at home among the Black folks he grew up alongside. Female characters are portrayed with compassion and some nuance, but they're all primarily seen through their relationship to Elvis (mother, girlfriend, wife). Young Elvis is called "fairy" because he wears eye makeup and bright colors, but this is portrayed negatively. In early scenes, Col. Tom Parker's carnival includes some stereotypically depicted "freaks."

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Death threats/aggressive fans. A concert riot shows chaos and police hitting individuals with batons. Elvis has several guns and shoots one while in an altered state. The assassinations of historical leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sharon Tate are referenced, and TV news footage of Robert Kennedy's murder is shown. Medical emergencies/collapses.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Kissing. Sensual dancing. Sex is implied through images of women in lingerie on a bed and shoes on the ground. Some skimpy costumes. Elvis' wiggling/gyrations during his performances upset authorities and parents because it resulted in girls (and women and some men/boys) feeling sexual urges ... and throwing underwear on stage. He's referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis." Marriage and infidelity are part of the plot.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes: "goddamn," "hell," "a--hole," "s--t," "sons of bitches," "bastard," and one "f--k." Insults include "bloodsucking old vampire" and "toad." "Fairy" used as a slur. Racist terms like "animalistic" and "voodoo devil music" are used to describe Elvis' dance moves and music, which were rooted in Black culture. "Negro" and "colored" are used.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Cadillac are seen and referenced on several occasions. Sun Records, RCA, NBC mentioned. Wonder Bread, Skippy, Saltines seen. Elvis lived lavishly and became a brand unto himself.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Pill-popping, morphine use, and needles -- as well as an enabling doctor -- are shown and discussed. It all leads to Elvis' drug dependency and is all portrayed negatively. Alcoholism is depicted through a character drinking vodka and beer; it winds up leading to her demise. Other characters also drink, and people smoke cigars, cigarettes, and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Elvis is writer-director Baz Luhrmann 's visually stylish musical biopic about The King of Rock 'n' Roll. As told through the perspective of Elvis' longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), it spends a lot of time on Presley's ( Austin Butler ) launch into superstardom, the business side of his time in the spotlight, and his Vegas residency in his later years. Much of the rest of his life is breezed through, including his marriage to Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ) and his time in Hollywood. Teens may be surprised to learn that authorities found Elvis' dance moves obscene; the movie also shows the racist attitudes of the 1950s and '60s. Vices of all kinds -- drinking, smoking, spending, gambling, and drug use -- bring different characters suffering and misfortune. Sex is suggested with shots of passionate kissing and lingerie-clad women in bed, and Priscilla walks around in a short nightie, revealing her butt cheeks. Elvis owns several guns and wields one while in an altered state; there's also a riot at a concert, some medical emergencies, mourning, and footage of historical assassinations. Language includes "goddamn," "hell," "s--t," and one instance of "f--k." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 25 parent reviews

Awful cussing ruined my idea of elvis

What's the story.

Through the perspective of Elvis Presley's longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), ELVIS explores how a boy from Tupelo, Miss., became the most successful singer of all time. Navigating the difficulties of a rapidly changing world, former carnival worker Parker reinvents Presley ( Austin Butler ) to keep him on top, but it comes at great personal, financial, and professional cost to the musician.

Is It Any Good?

Trying to tell the life story of the biggest global superstar of all time in one sitting is challenging, if not unwise. Turning what could've been a trilogy into one film, it's almost as if writer/director Baz Luhrmann is asking, what if a whole movie was a montage? Elvis whips through major events in Presley's life, all clipped as tightly as if they were in a music video. For an artist whose ascent to success was a whirlwind, perhaps it was an artistic choice to depict it in a similar way to the audience. But then, when the party stops for Elvis, so does the action, and Luhrmann abruptly turns to traditional biopic storytelling as Elvis mounts his 1968 comeback. By that time, though, viewers' brains may be so hyperstimulated that the abrupt switch will make the rest of the movie's long running time feel unnecessarily slow.

Plus, telling the story through Parker's eyes creates a barrier to getting to know Presley. The musical powerhouse is infantilized, and the movie suggests that Parker's manipulations led to the demise of both Elvis and his beloved mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). And Priscilla Presley ( Olivia DeJonge ) is portrayed more like a minor character than as the love of Elvis' life. Here, it feels like Elvis' real marriage was his partnership with Parker. Is this how Elvis would tell his story? It's hard to say, because after 2 1/2 hours, the superstar remains enigmatic, and too much is left unexplained. Still, Butler's performance is mesmerizing, the soundtrack is electric (many of Presley's songs are mixed in with those by other historically significant musicians, and the soundtrack includes plenty of modern tunes), and the idea that Elvis' lower-body wiggling was actually illegal is hysterical. Most of the central characters develop destructive habits -- but drugs, drinking, smoking, and gambling are never made to look fun, just a portal to misery. As an Elvis biopic, Elvis lacks. But as an exciting way for teens to get a taste of how "the good ol' days" weren't as "good" as some want to remember, it's ideal.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about prejudice. How does Elvis make the case that the objections to Presley's dance moves were based in racism? How does the movie suggest that White musicians' role in the advent of rock 'n' roll was cultural appropriation?

Do you agree with Col. Tom Parker's statement: "It doesn't matter if you do 10 stupid things, as long as you do one right"?

Is substance use glamorized ? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

How accurate do you think the film is to the actual events of Presley's life? Why might filmmakers choose to alter the facts in movies based on true stories?

How does this movie compare to other biopics you've seen? Do you like the mix of modern music with Presley's classics?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 13, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : August 9, 2022
• Cast : Austin Butler , Tom Hanks , Olivia DeJonge
• Director : Baz Luhrmann
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Brothers
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History , Music and Sing-Along
• Run time : 159 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking
• Awards : BAFTA , Golden Globe
• Last updated : May 4, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Elvis (2022) Review

24 Jun 2022

Elvis (2022)

It’s been close to a decade since Baz Luhrmann ’s last movie. Any question that time may have mellowed him is answered within the first few minutes of Elvis ; even by Luhrmann’s usual standards, the first act of this biopic is frantic with filmmaking acrobatics. Rat-a-tat editing. Dream sequences. Animated sequences. Loop-di-loop camera moves. Incongruous modern soundtrack. He immediately puts his foot down and goes racing through the life of Elvis Presley. It’s one hell of a ride, but sometimes it’s moving too fast for his audience to get more than a passing look at his characters.

Luhrmann’s ambitions are laudably grand. He follows Presley’s ( Austin Butler ) life from his teens, when he’s discovered playing alongside tired country music acts, to his final days as a bloated drug addict, so exhausted he can’t even hold his own microphone. That’s not where Luhrmann stops. He also tells the story of Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), Presley’s manager, who is depicted as a scheming villain who never misses an opportunity for a buck and puts money before Presley’s happiness. And further aims to show how America changed during Presley’s career, from the ’50s to the ’70s, especially for Black people, who Presley both supports and exploits, casually pinching influences from Black artists. Trying to squeeze in so much, even over a 159-minute running time, it’s not surprising that much of it feels rushed.

Luhrmann’s ‘more is not nearly enough’ style is at its most effective when he’s dealing in broad, simple emotions. In Moulin Rouge! or Romeo + Juliet , tales of desperate love at first sight, his explosive rhythms and romantic excess amplify all the primal yearning. It’s when he has to pause to contemplate subtler feelings that his confidence seems to desert him. His Great Gatsby was a dud because he showed little care for anyone’s interior lives. He was just there for the party. Elvis is no dud, but it again exposes Luhrmann’s disinterest in digging below the surface.

Presley’s story is told on a soap-operatic scale, towering highs or miserable lows, and little between. The relationship between Parker and Presley feels underexplored, with the otherwise smart Presley just in dumb thrall to a man clearly manipulating him. In scenes about Presley taking songs from the mouths of Black artists, Luhrmann doesn’t give a single Black character a significant voice, a surely unintended irony.

Austin Butler is sensational as Presley. He convinces at every age, from teen to 42.

Where Luhrmann absolutely excels, making some of the best work of his career, is in showing the addictive but destructive romance between Presley and his live audience. The performance sequences are a triumph. In Presley’s first live show we see how lust spreads through the crowd like a virus, girls screaming back at him in a way he doesn’t quite understand but loves. Both become hooked. As the film, and Presley’s career, go on, the audience grows into an insatiable animal, devouring more and more of Presley’s energy as he itches for another hit of adoration, prepared to surrender everything for it. There’s a manic, sexy, almost dangerous vigour to these scenes, which tell us more about Presley’s inner self than the rest of the film.

Austin Butler is sensational as Presley. It’s a huge ask for an actor to disappear into a man so well known that everyone and his uncle does a bad impression of him. Butler convinces at every age, from teen to 42. He’s not a particularly close visual match for Presley but he’s mastered vocal inflections and imperceptible details in Presley’s moves on stage that mean he captures his presence. More importantly, he gives a sense of a person, with normal insecurities, beneath the public image. Even if Luhrmann shies away from finding out who that normal person is, Butler suggests he’s there. Hanks’ Parker is written cartoonishly and he plays it appropriately. It’s not realistic but it’s entertaining.

Nobody comes to a Luhrmann film hoping for something under the top. His Elvis has all the dazzle and bombast you could ask, but it presents a portrait of an icon — not of a flesh-and-blood man.

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Baz luhrmann teases upcoming elvis concert film with “all that footage we found in the vaults”.

The director behind 2022's 'Elvis' hinted he was working on a concert film of never-before-seen footage from the superstar.

By Kirsten Chuba

Kirsten Chuba

Events Editor

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At the Met Gala on Monday night, Baz Luhrmann teased that he may not be quite done with Elvis Presley-related projects, following his 2022 Austin Butler -starring film.

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That’s The Way It Is was a documentary following Elvis Presley’s Summer Festival in Las Vegas during August 1970 (released alongside his 12th album of the same name) and Elvis on Tour was a 1972 documentary tracking the star while on a 15-city tour.

Baz Luhrmann teases that he may make a concert film out of all the unearthed concert footage he found when making #Elvis pic.twitter.com/kbK1ehEu5F — The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) May 6, 2024

The director had previously also said he would release an extended cut of Elvis with more of Butler’s performances, telling IndieWire during the film’s awards run, “There’s a whole lot of material that adds up to four hours, but I have gone on record now to say not today, not tomorrow, but at some point I would do [it]. Because Austin did his concerts full out. He did all the numbers. Austin just did it and it was an out of body experience to watch him do those full concerts, so one day I will cut those full concerts together.”

There has not been an update on that four-hour cut since; Elvis was nominated for eight Oscars at the 2023 ceremony, including best picture and a best actor nod for Butler.

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Welcome to Moody Blue Elvis Podcast. Here we will celebrate the life and legacy of Elvis Presley and create something he always wanted. Elvis always saw himself as "the hero" of comic books he enjoyed as a child. So, that's what we are doing; showing Elvis as he truly was - a hero, to so many. We hope you will stick around. TCB.

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