Every so often, there comes a watershed movie for a specific genre of film where any film made after can’t help but be compared to it. “2001” and sci-fi, “Psycho” and horror, “City Lights” and comedy. Well, back in 2007, “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” was released and forever changed the music biopic genre. It so thoroughly eviscerated the genre with its satire that even the best that have come since have been dinged a bit by its perfect parody.
Why then, you may be thinking, would you bring that up for a review of a serious, dramatic retelling of the life of Elvis Presley? Well, simply because so much of what Baz Luhrmann’s (“The Great Gatsby (2013),” “Moulin Rogue!”) “Elvis” does right threatens to be overshadowed by the mediocrity inherent to the genre that “Walk Hard” parodied so well almost fifteen years ago. Tropes and cliches so entrenched in the type of film this is that Luhrmann’s showman ship can’t help but be brought down some because of them.
The film recaps the life of Elvis Presley, played by Austin Butler (“The Carrie Diaries,” “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”), via narration from his former manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks (“Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away”), on his deathbed. This frame narrative is not only expertly done, but it helps to provide the audience with a lot of contexts to the events therein. It also helps to spice up the tale, as we’re told the story by a man who becomes increasingly less likable and eventually borders on completely gaslighting the audience.
Hanks’s performance is hard to judge. It fits the material certainly, going for big dramatic swings and at times veering into the comedic territory. It works with Luhrmann’s style and the type of story he’s going for, so even if its hard to say if it’s a good performance, it at least meshes with everything else that’s going on.
Butler, meanwhile, is a movie star. It’s hard to think of the last time an actor so fully lost themselves in a singular performance. Even lead roles from years past that went on to win major awards, like Rami Malek or Renée Zellweger, pale in comparison to the blood, sweat, and tears on display here. Every step in these blue suede shoes, every saunter, every drop of sweat pouring from Butler’s face sells this larger-than-life persona. Elvis went through so many different versions of himself throughout his life and Butler embodies all of them flawlessly because he isn’t going for caricature. This isn’t a Halloween costume or a bedazzled Las Vegas impersonation. This is a deeply respectful portrayal of one of the greatest musicians of all time.
The supporting cast can’t match up to Butler and Hanks though. While it could be argued that they don’t need to, it feels like the equivalent of casting a high school play with a teacher who used to act and have them be surrounded by a student ensemble. No one is bad, but no one is trying to match the energy from either Butler, Hanks, or Luhrmann. Olivia DeJonge (“The Visit,” “The Staircase (2022)”) gets the closest as Priscilla, Elvis’s longtime wife, but she becomes little more than a footnote to the story eventually. Richard Roxburgh (“Rake,” “Moulin Rogue!”) as Vernon, Elvis’s father seems almost wooden, and Helen Thomson (“Rake”) as Elvis’s mother is… well, there’s definitely a twinge of almost Norman Bates-ish motherly love between her performance and Butler’s.
Luhrmann is certainly a man with a distinct visual style, and as the Warner Bros logo first appears bedazzled in jewels and gold, it quickly becomes apparent that this film entirely belongs to him. Alongside co-writers Sam Bromell (“The Get Down”), Craig Pearce (“Romeo + Juliet,” “Moulin Rogue!”), and Jeremy Doner (“Damages,” “The Killing”), Luhrmann crafts a story spanning the entirety of Presley’s life. But it becomes quickly apparent in the latter half of the film that some trimming was not only possible but necessary. At two-hours-and-thirty-nine minutes, its not only a long film, but one that teeters into repetition in its latter half. The section on Elvis’s residence at the International hotel especially feels almost torturous, as it spirals on and on reiterating the same point that was made within the first ten minutes of the segment.
There’s a lot of ground to cover in this story, but not all of its feels remotely integral. Certainly, if one wanted to create an all-encompassing story of this man, then including as much as possible is a requirement. However, what no one seemed to tell Luhrmann is that not everything needs to be included to both make the overarching points he’s going for or to communicate to the audience who Elvis was. This length really hurts the last half of the film, specifically the International hotel segment, and it drags down what was an otherwise entertaining and high energy first half.
Regardless of that though, Luhrmann’s strengths as a visual storyteller are on full display. As shots pinball back and forth, realism is thrown out the window and he and cinematographer Mandy Walker (“Australia,” “Mulan (2020)”) pull out every kind of visual trick imaginable to be toyed with and reverse engineered. There are still quote-unquote normal parts of the film which as shot conventionally. But those segments make up possibly a quarter of the film’s runtime. For the rest of the film, it glides through visual metaphors, sweeping camera movements, and hyper exaggerated cuts. It feels at times like a film edited entirely like a music video, and it makes for not just a strong visual identity, but also proves integral to helping the audience understand Elvis, the artist.
A roadblock most films like this run into is how exactly to communicate to the audience how revolutionary the subject was at the time. Because obviously they were, why else would a film be made about them? Whereas previous biopics seem to fail in that regard, almost coming across as generic, Luhrmann cranks up his style and fully imbues this film with a sense of musical style, whimsy, and sex that forces you to watch. When Elvis dances for the first time, as mobs of young women clamor for him, the rapid cuts, bass drops, tight zooms, and copious amounts of sweat tell us only one thing: this man was all that mattered to them. And as Butler slides around on stages and fully commits to the symbol of sex and rock and roll that Presley was, Luhrmann’s goal for the overall film becomes evident: you will understand what he meant to those people, damn everything else.
If that’s the singular goal for his massive biopic of the life of The King, then Luhrmann unquestionably succeeds. It’s a film that lives and dies on its style and its performances, and even as the length becomes the film’s own worst enemy, those performances and that style are still there. It will likely leave you feeling less like you’ve seen a grand musical performance and more like you’ve spent all night in a Vegas casino, stumbling into the light and blinking as you try to regain your composure. You’re not quite sure what you’ve seen, but you know who you saw and that it was an experience regardless. 3/5
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