Elvis 2022

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

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. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight. 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. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. 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. 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 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. As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. (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. 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.

Those missteps, courtesy of director Baz Luhrmann and an ill-used Tom Hanks, squander Austin Butler's brilliant moments in the title role, which deserve a much ...

Much of it is devoted to meticulously replicating Presley's performances, including a detailed presentation of his acclaimed 1968 NBC special, which gives Butler's unerring mimicry an opportunity to shine. Here, Luhrmann (who shares script credit with three others, nearly a decade after his last film "The Great Gatsby") makes the near-fatal error of primarily telling the story from Parker's point of view. A colorful and shadowy figure, Parker's control prompted allegations of serious financial shenanigans that were only exposed after Presley's death in 1977.

Austin Butler soulfully croons and sways his hips right into our hearts as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's kaleidoscopic new biopic.

His film is bloated, yeah, but 2 hours and 40 minutes of our lives are better spent on Elvis Presley than the Season 4 finale of “Stranger Things.” “Elvis” is a long movie, and most of it is devoted to the pitfalls of fame. The villain — both in the story and in real life — is Hanks as Elvis’ eccentric and opportunistic manager. He meets Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) when he is serving overseas in Germany, and Lisa Marie is born. Like he did with “Moulin Rouge!,” the Aussie director interprets a nearly 70-year-old moment with wide-open modern eyes and a freewheeling sexuality. And Butler and Luhrmann don’t settle for nostalgia with them — they are electric and in your face.