He was the king of Rock and Roll.  Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) rose to the top of the charts throughout the 1950s until to his death in 1977.  Orchestrating his rise, and some say forming the star’s demise, too, is Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), an entertainment manager who lays claim to discovering Elvis in his early days and turning him into the massive, global sensation that he became.  Elvis led a turbulent life and had a tragic fall from grace, but his career – as short as it was – had an undeniable impact on the music industry and popular culture. 

Baz Luhrmann investigates the sway that Parker had over Elvis in the biopic that he directed for Warner Brothers with assistance on the page from Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner.  The 159-minute spectacle covers most of the star’s life while leaving plenty of opportunities for Butler to embrace The King’s signature style and flair on stage while regaling audiences with some of Elvis’ greatest hits. 

At the front of the film is Butler in the largest role of his career to date. He sells the idea of Elvis incredibly well and does not come off as merely an impersonator which has become a specific brand of performance all in itself. Butler has the benefit of a cradle-to-grave script to help inform his performance instead of just officiating a Vegas Chapel shotgun wedding, but that same script also challenges the young actor to embody the many facets of Elvis’ prolific career that saw him as a scrappy upstart singing blues and gospel, to a gyrating super star causing panic amongst the prudish, a war veteran, a movie star, a resurging icon with a Vegas residency, then finally – and tragically – a fallen idol. 

The problem with the script, however, is that while it allows Buttler to inhabit the many cycles of Elvis’ fame, it never stands still long enough to really delve in deep. A prime example is that his career as an actor is totally glossed over and summarized in a quick montage. Thirteen years and thirty-one titles to his name with maybe only ninety seconds of coverage in the bloated film. To be fair, Luhrmann has teased at a four-hour director’s cut which may have expanded on elements of Elvis’ life that were hurried along through kaleidoscopic montage in the theatrical cut. This really only becomes a problem when it deals with some of the more serious questions of Elvis’ career such as his racial relations. In the film, and in real life, he helped to bring African American music to the forefront of popular culture by borrowing the sound and style, and sometimes lifting entire songs and grafting them onto his performance. The film does not praise or condemn this practice, but Luhrmann brings the question back into focus many times throughout; intercutting a performance with a segregation rally and driving the film to one of its only halts the moment news broke of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Luhrmann continually brings up these racial relations but refuses to engage with them any further than the simple act of acknowledgment. By doing so, it makes Elvis feel like a film that is looking to unlock some answers, but because it stops short of ever delivering, it often times feels rudderless and aimless – a string of flashy sequences loosely connected through some dramatic scenes that elevate the work to being more than a late-night ad for an Elvis compilation album. 

It is not just the issues of race that Luhrmann’s film remains wishy-washy on, narratively Elvis does not come down on either side of the Col Parker discussions. This is a problem because the film is framed as Parker recalling his time with Elvis while on his deathbed. It goes so far as to open the film with the question of whether or not Parker was a good or bad influence on the King, and like with the issues of appropriation, Elvis refuses to answer. While the entire concept of centering a film around a sensation such as Elvis with a stuffy old man being played by Hanks in a noticeably weak performance given his caliber is questionable at best, that it refuses to state and defend a thesis and instead asks the audience to come to their own conclusions again leaves the film feeling directionless. 

As a narrator, Parker makes an odd choice. Even without the self-serving slant that already places the hustler into the realm of unreliability, there are large chunks of the film where Parker is not present. Notably, these scenes are some of the more dynamic of the film, not counting the concert performances. In some ways, Elvis is framed similarly to Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (2019) which found Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran reflecting on his time running with the mob and how his choices led to an alienation from his family. Parker, similarly, finds himself alone at the hour of his death, but where De Niro, while never outright confessing, allows us to see Sheeran’s remorse, Parker never admits to any wrongdoing or even moral stumblings. Both films show the sins, but only in Scorsese’s work do the characters begin the work of atonement.  

Where the film excels, though, is with its title character, Elvis, especially towards the end. Rise and fall narratives are almost always captivating as we get swept up by the hero even if, in this case, we know it will lead to tragedy. Butler is dynamic, magnetic, and everything needed to fill such iconic shoes in the boldly stylized world of the film. On stage, he fills the screen with explosive energy and puts his whole body and soul into the performance as he mimics Elvis’ iconic moves. The first performance in Vegas is nothing short of incredible and the camera does not allow Butler to hide from anything. Butler is not allowed to stay perfectly manicured throughout and we see him sweating and gasping as the set plays on and he moves like someone possessed by the spirit of Elvis himself. 

The third act also is home to some of the quieter moments in the film. The emotional moments land because the film does leave a trail of breadcrumbs to follow in the first two acts that help add weight to the humanistic side of the story. Elvis cannot be easily categorized as a traditional dramatic biopic, because for the most part, it seems wholly uninterested in exploring the star’s life off of the stage and out of the spotlight until the final forty-five or so minutes. We are very briefly introduced to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), but her departure from the film, and therefore Elvis’ life, struggles to land as she fills a role that can easily be summed up as wife. Elvis’ drug addiction comes seemingly out of nowhere, as does his infidelity, and his money problems all within the final throes of the narrative. It works because at this point Butler has won us over and Luhrmann smartly manipulates audiences with a final sequence of Elvis performing “Unchained Melody” seated at the piano, physically exhausted, and with an aid holding the microphone for him. It is like seeing a grandparent who was once a larger-than-life figure spending their final years hooked to machines that perform the basic functions which their bodies have retired from. 

Despite the name recognition of both Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks, Elvis remains a difficult film to easily recommend. While it is a little more straightforward than Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman (2019), it is not as narratively simple as Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Luhrmann’s anachronistic style permeates through every sequence of the film, and though many of the choices can be traced back to why they were made given Elvis’ influences, it can be understandably jarring to those looking for a more traditional take on the King of Rock and Roll. For those who stick with Luhrmann, they will find a film that, surprisingly, still works despite its peculiar pacing. With plenty of music peppered with dramatic scenes that feel ripped from the pages of a soap opera’s script, Elvis still manages to be highly enjoyable to watch if for no other reason than to bop along to some of the greatest songs of Elvis’ prolific career and take in the swirling colors that fill the frame. It may not reveal any new truths about its subject, but it does not seek to damage or belittle either. Even in moments of tragedy, Luhrmann does not canonize Elvis as a man without demons or human fallibility, but he always is sure to treat him with the utmost respect.