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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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Film credits.

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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Austin butler and tom hanks in baz luhrmann’s ‘elvis’: film review | cannes 2022.

The King of Rock and Roll gets suitably electrified biopic treatment in this kinetic vision of his life and career through the eyes of the financial abuser who controlled him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in ELVIS, 2022.

How you feel about Baz Luhrmann ’s Elvis will depend largely on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s signature brash, glitter-bomb maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishing section alone — even before Austin Butler ’s locomotive hips start doing their herky-jerky thing when Elvis Presley takes to the stage to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” in a rockabilly-chic pink suit — leaves you dizzy with its frenetic blast of scorching color, split screen, retro graphics and more edits per scene than a human eye can count. Add in the stratified, ear-bursting sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.

If the writing too seldom measures up to the astonishing visual impact, the affinity the director feels for his showman subject is both contagious and exhausting. Luhrmann’s taste for poperatic spectacle is evident all the way, resulting in a movie that exults in moments of high melodrama as much as in theatrical artifice and vigorously entertaining performance.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Warner Bros. Production companies: Bazmark, Jackal Group Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Davies, Charles Grounds, Josh McConville, Adam Dunn, Yola, Alton Mason, Gary Clark Jr., Shonka Dukureh, Chaydon Jay Director: Baz Luhrmann Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormack Director of photography: Mandy Walker Production designers: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy Costume designer: Catherine Martin Music: Elliott Wheeler Music supervisor: Anton Monsted Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond Visual effects supervisor: Thomas Wood Casting: Nikki Barrett

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How “Elvis” Plays the King

By Anthony Lane

An illustration of Elvis performing onstage while hands reach out for him. A sign reading Elvis is lit in the background.

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’ 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.

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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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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?

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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

Baz Luhrmann’s unruly ‘Elvis’ shakes up the Cannes Film Festival

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Elvis Presley famously never got the overseas touring career he deserved. He played only three venues outside the U.S., all of them in Canada in 1957, well before reaching peak superstardom. Instead of going international, he remained a fixture of the International Hotel in Las Vegas from 1969 to 1976, performing show after sold-out show until just a year before his death. Keeping Presley tied to Vegas was just one of the many machinations of his ruthlessly exploitative manager, Col. Tom Parker , who, it’s now widely believed, was afraid to leave the U.S. after having immigrated there illegally from the Netherlands years earlier.

That sad history is unpacked at some length in “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s unsurprisingly extravagant new movie about Presley’s life, art and career, which had its world premiere Wednesday night at the 75th annual Cannes Film Festival. (Warner Bros. will release the film June 24 in U.S. theaters.) Presley may never have gotten to perform for his fans in France, but Cannes gladly rolled out the red carpet for Luhrmann and his stars, Austin Butler, who makes a credibly charismatic Elvis, and Tom Hanks, who makes Col. Parker every inch the self-serving scumbag. Defensive and self-pitying, Parker narrates this long and gaudily overstuffed tale of a King and his Kingmaker, arguing — unpersuasively — that he isn’t the villain that history has made him out to be.

The problem is that while Parker is very much the villain of “Elvis,” Luhrmann has also gone out of his way to make him something of a co-protagonist. Ordinarily I like it when Hanks cuts against the good-guy grain, but his work here is hammy, grating and unmodulated to a fault, accomplished with a combo of fat suit, prosthetic jowls and over-the-top accent that makes Colin Farrell’s Penguin and Stellan Skarsgard’s Baron Von Harkonnen look positively restrained. It also adds unnecessary narrative padding to a movie that clocks in north of 2 1/2 hours, and which would earn more of that running time if it weren’t repeatedly forcing its ostensible subject to share his spotlight.

Tom Hanks holds a cane and a cigar in a scene from the movie "Elvis."

It’s a shame, because in many other respects, “Elvis” feels like an intuitive and sometimes even ideal match of filmmaker and subject. Luhrmann doesn’t do much by halves, and here his flamboyant stylistic excesses are very much of a piece with Elvis’ own. The performance sequences crackle with live-wire energy, even when Luhrmann is drawing them out or even slowing them down. (A blissful early scene of a glammed-out young Elvis getting a crowd of women all shook up — and unleashing wave after wave of pink-suited pelvic gyrations — seems to go on forever.) Sometimes Luhrmann will play the concert footage in sizzling black-and-white; sometimes he’ll split the screen not into quadrants but octants. It’s all a bit much, which means it’s just right.

Butler is a decent physical match for Elvis and a better one vocally. While that’s often the real Presley you hear singing in the movie, the wall-to-wall soundtrack also teems with Butler-recorded covers of “I’ll Fly Away,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” among others. Some effort is made early on to locate Elvis’ musical and spiritual origins in the churches and revival tents of Mississippi, and also to confront his oft-contested legacy as a performer and appropriator of Black music. Among the key Black artists seen briefly here are B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Little Richard (Alton Mason) and Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh).

Before long, Col. Parker catches on to the bottomless commercial potential of an artist who could “sell a Black sound with a white face,” as Presley was described in Eugene Jarecki’s excellent 2018 documentary, “The King.” That film pointedly drew a parallel between the waste and decadence of Presley’s ignominious final years and the moral complacency and confusion of Trump’s America. By contrast, Luhrmann’s “Elvis” largely keeps politics and larger metaphors at bay; it’s content to spin a conventional, crowd-pleasing narrative of an iconic artist’s rise and fall.

Joely Mbundu places an arm around Pablo Schils in a scene from the movie "Tori and Lokita."

And so we see Elvis’ career triumphs, his meteoric ascent to the top of the charts and his proud defiance of the conservative-minded squares who tried to keep his devilish dancing under control. We see his tempestuous marriage to Priscilla (a sympathetic Olivia DeJonge); his neglect of his daughter, Lisa Marie; and his years struggling with addiction and depression, most of which play out in a sprawling Vegas penthouse suite that looks more like a prison in every shot. To complain that “Elvis” is basically a compilation of musical-biopic conventions is a bit like complaining about a greatest-hits album; it also misses one of Luhrmann’s strengths as a filmmaker, which is his ability to suffuse clichés with sincerity, energy and feeling.

Those gifts were on unimprovable display in Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge,” which kicked off the 2001 festival in high style. That was the first edition of Cannes programmed by its longtime artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, and the opening-night selection of “Moulin Rouge” was a major coup that improved relations between the festival and Hollywood, which had grown somewhat reluctant in the ’90s to bring studio films to the Croisette. Luhrmann would return to open the 2013 festival with “The Great Gatsby,” which, like most opening-night films, was forgotten within a few days’ time but nonetheless felt like an ideal starter for an event where art, commerce, glamour and silliness exist in near-perfect balance. To that end, “Elvis” wouldn’t have been a bad choice of Cannes opener this year, though I suspect that Warner Bros., which has high hopes for the movie when it’s released next month, wanted to avoid the harsher critical scrutiny that often comes with an opening-night reception.

And so “Elvis” landed late in the festival and played outside the main competition, which has produced a number of strong entries as it enters its final stretch. One of the most roundly admired so far is “Tori and Lokita,” the best work in nearly a decade from the two-time Palme d’Or-winning Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Running a taut 88 minutes (which means you could watch it almost twice in the time it would take you to get through “Elvis” once), the movie follows two African immigrants, 11-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 16-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu), who are posing as brother and sister in an unnamed Belgian city. There, they struggle to survive and forge a life for themselves, finding themselves at the nonexistent mercy of drug dealers, sexual abusers and corrupt church leaders alike.

Elliott Crosset Hove carries a heavy load on his back in a scene from the movie "Godland."

The Dardennes don’t announce all this upfront. As usual, their method is to drop you right into a swift, relentlessly naturalistic story in which character and circumstance are frequently revealed in a flurry of white-knuckle action. What unfolds is an infuriating tale of exploitation, in which the very hope of a better life is repeatedly weaponized against Tori and Lokita, luring them into ever more despair-worthy conditions of enslavement. And yet even in a drama whose every development is motivated by material need — and even with a devastating wallop of an ending — the Dardennes somehow push their way to an impossible state of grace.

Another outstanding drama about the challenges of survival in a strange land could be found in the masterful “Godland,” though unlike the furiously paced “Tori and Lokita,” this one is a long, slow burn — or perhaps a long, slow thaw, given its chilly Nordic setting. Mysteriously absent from the main competition (it premiered in an adjacent strand of the festival called Un Certain Regard), this latest drama from the Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason ( “A White, White Day” ) follows a Danish priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), who is called on to build a church in the frigid north. The difficulty of the journey is, in some ways, exacerbated by the clergyman’s own pretensions and delusions; life proves no more hospitable when he finally reaches his destination.

Magnificently shot in a nearly square frame with rounded corners, an aesthetic that evokes the old photographs that Lucas likes to take in his spare time, “Godland” tells a story of natural wonder, elemental beauty and human folly. Hove makes Lucas a boldly repellent protagonist, a one-man rebuke to the idea that faith necessarily endows anyone with foresight, humility or kindness. His story has some of the bleak, fatalistic wit of “A White, White Day”; it also has that movie’s excellent star, Ingvar Sigurðsson, who serves as both Lucas’ guide and his nemesis. By the end you’re grateful to have experienced this long and treacherous journey with them, even if neither of them can say the same.

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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

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

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

Warner Bros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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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In Theaters

June 24, 2022
Austin Butler as Elvis Presley; Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker; Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley; Richard Roxburgh as Vernon Presley; Helen Thomson as Gladys Presley; Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King

Home Release Date

August 9, 2022
Baz Luhrmann

Distributor

Warner Bros.

Movie Review

You could call Col. Tom Parker a cheat or a con man.

But in truth, he was a full-blooded carny man. He cut his money-making teeth in a carnival sideshow, and he had an unerring instinct for what would entice the public to loosen their purse strings.

By the time Parker first laid his eyes on a mop-haired kid named Elvis Presley, he had already moved into the country-music management biz. But his current guitar-plucking clients were dropped like a hot rock after the faux colonel laid eyes on that skinny, leg-shaking boy.

Indeed, Elvis practically smoldered with dark-haired good looks; the vocal oomph of a Black R&B singer; and the raw, hormonal appeal of every schoolgirl’s darkest fantasies. On top of all that , he was really just an inexperienced and nervous momma’s boy. And that made him an absolutely perfect project for Col. Tom Parker.

This boy named Elvis was a promoter’s dream. With just a little tweaking, a bit of fast-and-easy deal-making and dash of merchandizing know-how—all things in Parker’s skill set—they could make some pretty good money. Bigger money, in fact, than Parker had ever hoped for.

The biggest challenge, of course, was figuring out how best to manipulate the boy’s family and how best to break this jittery stallion. From there, Parker might be able to sit in the saddle and ride things out for a few years.

Who knows, carny man Col. Tom Parker might even put together the biggest sideshow in the land.

Positive Elements

This film depicts Elvis, the man, as someone who always wanted to stay true to the values instilled in him by his mother. At the same time, he was obviously susceptible to being controlled by a manipulative and domineering manager. As such, Elvis’ biggest personal triumphs are moments when he pushes back against Col. Parker’s control and tries to voice his thoughts about the music he loved and the churning cultural happenings in the world around him.

Whether all that is true or not, it projects a man who wants to do what’s right and wants to stay true to his core values. In fact, even in his waning years when Elvis is plagued by drug abuse and a crumbling family life, it’s suggested that most of his woes were caused by others who wanted to keep the money machine rolling.

Elvis’ mom declares, “Family is the most important thing of all.” And Elvis takes that belief to heart. In fact, Col. Parker often uses that sincerely held conviction to manipulate Elvis and his family members.

Spiritual Elements

Early on, a young Elvis stumbles upon a revival tent filled with singing and dancing Black worshipers. He’s swept up in the music and the spirit of the group and ends up being “slain in the spirit” with other worshipers during the God-proclaiming service.

Later in his career, Elvis sings a number of gospel and spiritually focused tunes, including “Glory Hallelujah.”

Elvis’ mom repeatedly talks about his singing and movements being a “gift from God” and a part of God’s will.

Col. Parker’s other client, Hank Snow, talks of spending the night in prayer. As a boy, Elvis loves the superhero Captain Marvel who always wants to “fly to the Rock of Eternity.” During some difficult cultural moments—such as the day when Martin Luther King is tragically shot—Elvis wants to make a public statement but is held in check by his manager. So, he decides to sing his feeling on air instead. “A Reverend once told me that when things are too dangerous to say, sing,” he notes.

Sexual Content

As a boy, Elvis peeks in at a man and a woman dancing suggestively to R&B music. He later sees other Black performers using the sexually suggestive moves that he adopts and exaggerates on stage. In fact, the film promotes that early shaking sexuality as the camera focuses on his crotch and women (both young and old) begin screaming over his hip-thrusting moves. Elsewhere, a male audience member calls Elvis a long-haired “fairy.”

In Elvis’ early days, his on-stage gyrations raise the ire of a local politician (who’s backed by Confederate flags) who compares his moves to the “animal behavior” of “Negros.” He is labeled with the moniker of “Elvis the Pelvis.”

Col. Parker clearly sees the money-making potential of his client’s sex appeal. As girls swarm the young singer, someone worries that they might hurt Elvis. Parker replies, “Hurt him, they want to—,” before being cut off. He calls Elvis a “piece of forbidden fruit.” Soon after, women begin throwing panties on stage as tributes to Elvis’ appeal. He’s soon arrested for “crimes of lust and perversion.”

We see Elvis and several other Black performers with their shirts off. And the camera catches a peek at a woman in Elvis’ hotel room who is lying on his bed dressed only in skimpy underwear.

Elvis and his young love interest, Priscilla, kiss. And later, after being married for a number of years, they kiss goodbye as she leaves him. We also see Elvis kissing lots of women from his audience, while Priscilla watches.

Violent Content

An Elvis concert devolves into a chaotic riot as police charge in to end his onstage gyrations. People scream and tumble over one another as cops swing batons. There are also short clips of news shows reporting the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

Both Colonel Parker and Elvis collapse, at different times, because of medical or drug problems.

Crude or Profane Language

The biggest language abuses here come in the form of nearly 20 misuses of God’s name (14 of those combining “god” with “d–n”). There are also two s-words and several uses each of “d–n,” “b–ch,” “a–,” “h—” and “b–tard.”

The word “Negro” is used derogatorily several times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Elvis and his entourage (including his “Memphis Mafia” companions) drink beer, champagne and hard liquor. And even though a young Elvis asks his mother to drink less, we soon realize that she’s an alcoholic. She drinks herself into an early grave.

Smoking is also quite common in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and we see lots of people puffing on cigarettes everywhere the camera goes. Col. Parker regularly has a cigar in his mouth or hands.

Elvis starts popping unidentified “pep” pills at a young age to keep going through a hectic touring schedule. And we see that habit grow until it becomes an addiction—all encouraged and spurred on by Col. Parker. (The camera examines an older Elvis’ bathroom counter packed with bottles of pills.) One scene, for instance, shows a drugged-out Elvis who can’t perform, and Parker demands that a doctor inject him with whatever it takes to get him out on stage. We see film footage of the real Elvis on stage just weeks before his death—bloated and barely able to stand because of drugs and overeating.

Other Negative Elements

Col. Parker earns the nickname “Snowman” because of his many snow-job manipulations that he pulls on everyone around him, including an aware-but-susceptible Elvis himself.

Col. Parker is a heavy gambler and is driven by his growing debt to push Elvis harder in spite of the man’s failing health. In fact, Col. Parker manufactures things at every turn to keep Elvis doing what he wants him to: from family crises to fake death threats.

It’s suggested that Col. Parker’s nixing of the Star is Born film project, later in Elvis’ life, kept him from rejuvenating his career and cleaning up his drug habit.

Elvis was much more than just the biggest-selling solo act in music history. He was also a charismatic legend whose career veered from a cultural lightning rod to a self-parodying B-movie star, from musical icon to drug-fueled womanizer.

That’s a whole lot to dance and sing through in a mere two-and-a half hours of movie. So, where do you cut and trim? What do you make far bigger than reality? Or far better?

Director Baz Luhrmann has pulled out all the creative, cinematic and choreographic stops with Elvis . He aims his camera lens at both the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and his heavy-handed manager, Col. Tom Parker. That results in a movie that’s part “All Shook Up” biography and part “Devil in Disguise” villain’s tale.

Is this pic entertaining? Uh wella blessa my soul, Yes! It loves its hero with a love that’s true. And in that light, lead Austin Butler is wildly enjoyable to watch onscreen.

The film, however, also stumbles at times. It’s packed with more misuses of God’s name, heavy drinking and drug abuse than most family audiences will want to swallow.

All in all, Elvis the movie is a colorful, mixed bag. Much like the famed singer himself.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Pointless explosion of super-spangly sparkles … Elvis.

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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Common sense media reviewers.

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

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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Parents say (25)
Kids say (34)

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 : April 3, 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.

Suggest an 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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Bon Jovi docuseries 'Thank You, Goodnight' is an argument for respect

Eric Deggans

Jon Bon Jovi at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn., in 2013. David Bergman/Hulu hide caption

Jon Bon Jovi at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn., in 2013.

Hulu's docuseries Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story , spends a lot of time building up the Bon Jovi legend — exploring the band's almost unbelievable 40-plus-year run from playing hardscrabble rock clubs in New Jersey to earning platinum albums and entry into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

But what moved me most in the four-part series was something more revealing: its close look at the struggle by lead singer Jon Bon Jovi to overcome vocal problems which nearly led him to quit the band.

Footage of the singer croaking through vocal exercises, undergoing laser treatments, enduring acupuncture and finally turning to surgery is sprinkled throughout the series, which toggles back and forth between his problems in 2022 and a chronological story of the band's triumphs and tragedies from its earliest days.

Refusing to be Fat Elvis

Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed for Thank You, Goodnight . Disney/Hulu hide caption

Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed for Thank You, Goodnight .

Through it all, a question hangs: Will Bon Jovi ever recover enough vocal strength to lead a 40th anniversary tour?

"If I can't be the very best I can be, I'm out," he tells the cameras, still looking a bit boyish despite his voluminous gray hair at age 62. "I'm not here to drag down the legacy, I'm not here for the 'Where are they now?' tour ... I'm not ever gonna be the Fat Elvis ... That ain't happening."

Filmmaker Gotham Chopra — who has also directed docuseries about his father, spiritualist Deepak Chopra, and star quarterback Tom Brady — digs deeply into the band's history, aided by boatloads of pictures, video footage and early recordings provided by the group.

Former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora in Thank You, Goodnight Disney/Hulu hide caption

Former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora in Thank You, Goodnight

Chopra gets folks from the group's tight inner circle to speak up, including former manager Doc McGhee and guitarist Richie Sambora, who quit the band in 2013. ("Are we telling the truth, or are we going to lie, what are we going to do?" Sambora cracks to his offscreen interviewer. "Let's figure it out.")

But anyone expecting gossipy dish will walk away disappointed. Even major scandals in the band's history are handled with care, including the firing of founding bassist Alec John Such in 1994 (and the admission that his replacement, Hugh McDonald, already had been secretly playing bass parts on their albums for years), drummer Tico Torres' stint in addiction treatment and Sambora's decision to quit midway through a tour in 2013, with no notice to bandmates he had performed alongside for 30 years.

Alec John Such, a founding member of Bon Jovi, dies at 70

Sambora's explanation: When issues with substance use and family problems led him to miss recording sessions, Bon Jovi got producer John Shanks to play more guitar on their 2013 record What About Now . And Sambora was hurt.

"[Bon Jovi] had the whole thing kinda planned out," Sambora says, "which basically was telling me, um, 'I can do it without you.'"

Building a band on rock anthems

Jon Bon Jovi with guitarist Phil X. Disney/Hulu hide caption

Jon Bon Jovi with guitarist Phil X.

The docuseries shows how young New Jersey native John Bongiovi turned a job as a gofer at legendary recording studio The Power Station – owned by a cousin — into a recording of his first hit in the early 1980s, Runaway . His song eventually caught the ear of another little-known artist from New Jersey called Bruce Springsteen.

"The first demo I got of Jon's was a good song," says Springsteen, a longtime friend of Bon Jovi. "I mean, Jon's great talent is these big, powerful pop rock choruses that just demand to be sung by, you know, 20,000 people in an arena."

Music Interviews

Rock star jon bon jovi comes full 'circle'.

Thank You, Goodnight shows the band really took off by honing those rock anthems with songwriter Desmond Child, while simultaneously developing videos that showcased their status as a fun, rollicking live band. Hits like You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer and Wanted: Dead or Alive made them MTV darlings and rock superstars.

Through it all, the singer and bandleader is shown as the group's visionary and spark plug, open about how strategically he pushed the band to write hit songs and positioned them for commercial success.

"It wasn't as though I woke up one morning and was the best singer in the school, or on the block, or in my house," he tells the camera, laughing. "I just had a desire and a work ethic that was always the driving force."

I saw that dynamic up close in the mid-1990s when I worked as a music critic in New Jersey, spending time with Jon Bon Jovi and the band. Back then, his mother ran the group's fan club and was always trying to convince the local rock critic to write about her superstar son – I was fascinated by how the band shrugged off criticisms of being uncool and survived changing musical trends, led by a frontman who worked hard to stay grounded.

Bon Jovi was always gracious and willing to talk; he even introduced me to then-New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman at one of his legendary Christmas charity concerts. (And in a crazy coincidence, the band's backup singer Everett Bradley is an old friend from college.)

I think the docuseries captures Bon Jovi's skill at leading the group through challenges musical and otherwise — from metal's slow fade off the pop charts to the rise of grunge rock — something the singer rarely gets credit for achieving.

Still, much of Thank You, Goodnight feels like an extended celebration of the band and its charismatic frontman, leavened by his earnest effort to regain control of his voice. If you're not a Bon Jovi fan, four episodes of this story may feel like a bit much (I'd recommend at least watching the first and last episodes.)

More than anything, the docuseries feels like an extended argument for something Bon Jovi has struggled to achieve, even amid million selling records and top-grossing concert tours – respect as a legendary rock band.

The audio and digital versions of this story were edited by Jennifer Vanasco .

La Môme, Elvis... c'est quoi un bon biopic musical? (Partie 1/1)

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