★★★★☆
It’s the morphine, silly. It’s all about the morphine. This music biopic from the director Baz Luhrmann plunges early on into a morphine dripper and does not ever, tonally at least, return. The opioid is pulsing into the arm of Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks under gallons of latex as a cross between Fat Bastard from Austin Powers and Rumpelstiltskin.
It’s 1997 and the colonel is on his deathbed, reflecting on his difficult relationship with his most famous client. “I did not kill Elvis,” Parker says via Hanks’s impish cod-European delivery (Parker was Dutch, Hanks does Franco-German). “I made Elvis!”
And, whoosh, another shot of morphine and down we go, into the pipe, for an explicit visual metaphor — this film will be a mind-altering, pleasure-filled, rock’n’roll fever dream. And at several points in what is easily Luhrmann’s best film since Romeo + Juliet, it really is.
Credit here must go to the breakout star Austin Butler as the King. The 30-year-old, mostly below the radar until now, has risen to the near-impossible task of emulating Elvis with gobsmacking aplomb.
It’s a version that goes beyond imitation into something much more dangerous. During three stunningly realised set-piece numbers (That’s All Right, Heartbreak Hotel, Suspicious Minds) Butler’s Elvis seems almost physically possessed.
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Yes, he does the swivelling hips routine, but he also brings an elemental abandon to the performance, as well as furious vocal intensity. Butler spent a year with a voice coach mastering the sound of young Elvis, while Luhrmann has admitted to digitally “blending” in some of the King’s later crooning to perfectly replicate that definitive 1970s rasp.
The standout scene, however, is an early performance of That’s All Right, in 1955, that Luhrmann stages as a disturbing Dionysian event where hormonally unleashed teenage girls appear desperate, teeth bared, to tear their idol to pieces.
The Greeks called this set-up sparagmos, and it was the provocative subject of the Tennessee Williams movie adaptation from 1959, Suddenly, Last Summer, where a mental patient played by Elizabeth Taylor is traumatised by witnessing the death of her handsome cousin who is torn apart by Spanish street urchins in a wild, eroticised frenzy.
Luhrmann, always a cultural magpie, is firmly in this territory with his take on the Elvis mythology (a little less conversation a little more sparagmos?). The power of the film, and indeed of the man, Luhrmann suggests, resides in that rare ability to tap the ineffable, the erotic, and the dark underside of the peachy clean 1950s American Dream.
“It’s the white man, driven to the level of the negro!” says an outraged senator (Nicholas Bell), while watching Elvis perform Hound Dog on television. This opens up a seam of argument and debate, about Elvis as an, ahem, “champion of black music” that the screenplay, co-written by Luhrmann (and three others) doesn’t quite have the energy, or the temerity, to pursue.
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Instead it’s enough to know that Elvis, to a certain strata of US society, signified danger. And these spine-tingling musical performances, expertly edited by Luhrmann with beguiling stroboscopic rhythms, convey that transgressive energy while making the entire project a must-see movie.
The material around the numbers is inevitably not quite as compelling. The woozy yet cursory skip through the life of Presley is thematically justifiable (remember the morphine?), but can feel incredibly shallow.
While the only substantial characters in the film are Elvis and Parker, with even Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) reduced to second-banana status and shouldering some of the worst dialogue in the movie. “You’re only happy when you sing the music that you love!” Priscilla says blankly, like an especially jaded life coach, to Elvis after his movie career has sputtered.
He thus decides to don the iconic black leathers and perform the 1968 Christmas comeback special to reinvigorate his musical mojo. It’s one of several repetitive “Follow your heart, Elvis!” moments that mark the progression of the film’s simplistic chronological narrative.
As Elvis becomes increasingly famous he encounters obstacles and negative forces that try to control him and his music. But no, he follows his heart, he wiggles his hips despite the ban, he sings If I Can Dream despite the warning, and he refuses, goddam it, to wear a fuzzy jumper for the Christmas special.
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This structural gaucheness, of course, hardly matters. Luhrmann has always been an atrocious dramatist, one who displays the storytelling instincts of an amphetamine-addled gnat. He does, however, have the genius instincts of a pop video supremo. And in the pop god Elvis Presley he may have found his perfect subject.
12A, 160min
In cinemas
