159 min | PG-13 | June 24, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A poor kid from Tupelo invents a new kind of American star and a carnival huckster turns him into a slot machine. Baz Luhrmann films the whole tragedy at the speed of a music video. The man inside the jumpsuit keeps slipping out of frame.
Elvis tells the rise and ruin of Elvis Presley, but it tells it through the mouth of the man who profited from him. Colonel Tom Parker narrates from a hospital bed, defending himself against the charge that he killed his client. That framing is the real subject of the film. This is a movie about a performer who never controls his own story, narrated by the parasite who owned it. Baz Luhrmann builds the picture around the gap between the body on stage and the contract that body signed.
Austin Butler plays Elvis as a coiled mix of menace and shyness. He gets the hip swivel and the curled lip, but the better trick is the voice, which slides from a mumble into a roar without warning. Butler shows a man who only knows who he is when he is moving. Tom Hanks plays Parker buried under prosthetics and a fog of fake accent, all soft menace and accounting-ledger logic. Olivia DeJonge plays Priscilla with a watchful stillness that the rest of the film never slows down enough to match. Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays B.B. King as the calm professional who sees the trap closing before Elvis does.
Luhrmann directs the way he always directs, which is at full volume with no pauses. He and co-writers Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner cut decades into montage and stitch the soundtrack with anachronistic hip-hop and trap beats over period footage. The editing is the signature. Whip pans, split screens, and comic-book panels race past faster than the eye can hold them. The approach works for the 1968 comeback special, where the camera finally locks onto Butler in close-up and lets a single performance breathe. It works against the quiet scenes, which get chopped before they can land.
The film is strongest when it admits that Elvis built his sound by taking from Black artists and Parker built a fortune by taking from Elvis. That theme of extraction runs through every frame. The closing stretch, where Las Vegas becomes a cage and the drugs do their work, finds a genuine sadness under the sequins. Luhrmann cannot resist filming a funeral like a fireworks show. He has the eye to see the tragedy and not the patience to sit inside it.