Elvis: he's everywhere and nowhere, a mononym as familiar as Coke and a cipher as abstract as the clichés he came to (dis)embody. Both the King of Rock 'n' Roll and a costume party punchline, the man born Elvis Presley left the building an icon, his image now so ubiquitous — and for so long — that it's easy to forget how seismically his appearance ruptured the culture in the 50s.
As music critic Greil Marcus once wrote: "Elvis was not a phenomenon. He was not a craze. He was not even, or at least not only, a singer, or an artist. He was that perfect American symbol, fundamentally a mystery."
"We could call him the original superhero. He is born of dust," says Baz Luhrmann, whose new film – simply titled Elvis – confirms the Australian director as one of the few remaining non-franchise filmmakers whose movies are an event at the comic-book-dominated multiplex.
The film literalises that heroic parallel: before the jumpsuits and the capes and the Vegas excess, there's the young Tupelo, Mississippi boy (played by Chaydon Jay) poring over a Captain Marvel comic with fascination.
For a kid growing up in small-town Australia, as Luhrmann did, Elvis may as well have hailed from outer space. Luhrmann's father at one time ran the local movie house in Herons Creek, NSW, where, the director recalls: "Every Sunday we would have Elvis matinees. I'm probably forgetting how silly it all was, but I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world."
In Luhrmann's new film, an ambitious production that was filmed in Queensland and endured a pandemic shutdown thanks to co-star Tom Hanks's COVID diagnosis, the director may have found his perfect muse.
Never one to resist the grandest of pop tales (see: Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby), Luhrmann doesn't so much set out to humanise Presley, or seek to explain his life — an impossible, foolish errand — as he does to capture his ability to channel both personal emotions and ideas that span the entirety of post-war pop culture, from music to race, politics, sex, and stardom.
The result is a hyperkinetic whirl of sound and vision that rarely slows to catch its breath. Luhrmann's film knows that Elvis was the rock star myth from which all the music biopic clichés were forged, and is canny enough to lean into those tropes — upholding the iconography in order to transcend it.
With Elvis, Luhrmann takes his feelings — our feelings — for the King and plays his life as a distinctly American jukebox tragedy, a prism through which to refract the rise, fall and eventual reincarnation of a star-as-eternal-product.
"When the business gets out of whack with the show, then tragedy ensues."
To tell the story, the director turned to what he knows best: showbiz razzamatazz, framing the star's life through the slippery perspective of Colonel Tom Parker, the one-time carnival barker turned Elvis's infamously exploitative manager.
As played by Hanks — with a mischievous twinkle that occasionally strays toward Goldmember burlesque — the Colonel is a complex, paradoxical figure; an immigrant corrupted by the dark heart of the American dream.
"It's a kind of toxic marriage; a marriage that is amazing and loving in the beginning, and becomes stultifying and destructive," Luhrmann explains.
Parker's shapeshifting narrative, a giddy blend of fact and fancy, lets Luhrmann loose from the shackles of realism to find the kind of truth that only artifice can reveal. Luhrmann's camera is both showman and fan, pop historian and swooning teenager.
With his smoky eyeliner and pretty perma-pout, there's a queerness to this Elvis that catches the singer's androgynous, otherworldly appeal.
For the daunting lead role, Luhrmann cast 30-year-old Californian Austin Butler, a musician and actor who — when he discovered the filmmaker was making an Elvis picture — sent in an audition tape of himself performing Unchained Melody, an ode to his recently departed mother who, much like Elvis, he lost at a young age.
It was an emotional moment for Butler, who grew up in a house of Elvis fans, including his grandmother, who was a high-schooler during the star's rise to fame.
"I don't really remember a time where I didn't know who he was. There was always Elvis music around," says the actor, whose hair is sandy, almost surfer-like when we meet – a detail that can't help but recall Elvis's own pre-dye locks.
Butler's electrifying performance doesn't so much impersonate Presley as commune with his spirit; it's wired and nervy, like a pop culture big bang detonated in a body that can barely contain the energy.
Luhrmann compares the actor's presence to Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.
Both director and star knew the performance couldn't be an Elvis impersonation, that they'd have to summon something special. Butler says the key was finding his character's internal motivation rather than simply focusing on external, physical mimesis.
"It is a tricky balance, because you [also] want to be incredibly specific. And so physically, it was like, 'What are his eyes doing? What is his mouth doing, and what is his head doing? What was every aspect of his body doing?' At times it felt nearly impossible because it was so much information that I was taking in."
The captivating thrill of the film might come as a surprise, especially for those who grew up knowing Elvis as little more than a caricature, or — for a younger generation — a cultural line in the sand.
"Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me," went Public Enemy's notorious line in 1989's Fight the Power, a throwdown that vocalised Black culture's thorny relationship with Presley, who came to be the symbol of white rock 'n' roll's theft of their music. As cultural critic Margo Jefferson put it in her 1973 essay for Harper's: "Elvis Presley was the greatest minstrel America ever spawned, and he appeared in bold whiteface."
Luhrmann's film doesn't shy away from these elements, focusing on key supporting players, from Big Mama Thornton to B.B. King and Little Richard, who can only watch from the sidelines as their white peer is plucked for instant stardom.
But the film also gives us the Southern boy who grew up poor and lived for a spell in an all-Black neighbourhood; who immersed himself in the blues and gospel music to which he felt spiritually drawn.
The soundtrack, a typically Luhrmann-esque mix of contemporary pop and period-accurate music, draws a line from a star who scandalised white audiences in the 50s with his Black sound to the current chart dominance of Black pop. When Thornton's Hound Dog bleeds into Doja Cat's hip-hop track Vegas, it's as though time and space have collapsed.
That Elvis might continue to resonate in pop is a testament to just how much he set the template for superstardom. Yet he also established another blueprint, that of the tragic, Icarus-like icon who flew, as Luhrmann is fond of saying, too close to the sun — for dearly beloved artists like Prince, Whitney Houston, and Presley's one-time son-in-law and heir to his singular superstardom, Michael Jackson.
"All icons are really flawed. We want them to be perfect. We want them to be gods. We want them to be young and beautiful forever. And at some point, they're just human beings and reality and life just exhausts them," Luhrmann says, his voice contemplative, tinged with sadness.
"I knew Prince well. I knew Michael a bit. We were working on something, trying to do a song on Moulin Rouge! I'd get the occasional midnight phone call from Michael with a funny voice," he continues.
"The thing is, though, Michael and Prince and Elvis — who are icons, they're not just great pop stars — they are all only living for the unconditional love across the footlights. They all said that they're anti drugs but all of them ended up addicted to opioids, variously for physical ailments, and I think to numb the fact that, unfortunately, when you have that much love coming across the footlights, nothing else kind of does it for you, you know?
You can feel this in the film's extraordinary final sequence, in which the late-period Vegas performer — embodied first by Butler and then, via a startling jump cut, footage of real-life Elvis — sweats through his performance of Unchained Melody, a bloated, decaying husk from which that voice soars, like some supernatural entity finally freed of its human form.
The scene brought Butler full circle to that first audition tape.
"It was really emotional for me, getting to do that performance, it was really special and tragic, and difficult and euphoric — all at the same time," says the actor.
That sense of euphoric tragedy powers the movie's unabashed, heart-on-rhinestone-spangled-sleeve catharsis, which is unafraid of courting big, melodramatic sentiment: Elvis was living for the unconditional love of his fans, and that love killed him.
The film understands that there is power in cliché, that pop music's universality gives us permission to feel emotions and write them large. In that final sequence, Elvis is Michael and Prince, he's Whitney, he's Kurt and he's Amy. He's also, through the sound of that voice, a vessel for everything all of us might be going through in that moment.
When I tell Luhrmann just how much, and how unexpectedly, I was moved by the film, he pauses; the vulnerability is momentarily disarming.
"It's been hard times, you know," he says, pointing toward the theatrical experience as something that might bring audiences back together.
"If one person gets any emotion from anything we collectively toil to make, it means all the world to us. It really does."
Elvis is in cinemas now.
