elvis movie review rolling stone

Why Isn’t ‘Elvis’ a Home Run? Because It’s Not Actually Baz Luhrmann-ish Enough

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Reading the reviews of Baz Luhrmann ’s “ Elvis ,” one would be forgiven for thinking that it must be some madly baroque spectacle of exquisite excess, the sort of thing that makes people roll their eyes — or that makes the eyes of others widen with delight — when they hear the name “Baz Luhrmann.”

There are ways you could say the movie lives up to that. “Elvis” kicks off with a 10-minute prelude of split-screen imagery that leaps ahead to Elvis in Las Vegas in the ’70s. The flamboyant virtuosity of the filmmaking gives you a contact high. Sitting through this fanfare, I thought, “Yes! Great! More!” (A trio of words that might be Baz Lurhmann’s middle names.)

Except that it’s not. Not really. I mean, not really .

“Elvis” is decorated with Baz touches: the outrageously bejeweled Warner Bros. logo at the start, the montage that transforms Elvis’s life with Priscilla and the Memphis Mafia in the ’60s into a kind of pastel Elvis movie, and the wicked gleam of Tom Hanks ’ performance as Col. Tom Parker. (Speaking in his Dutch-meets-Middle-American-carny-barker accent, Hanks reminded me of no one so much as the aging Nazi villain portrayed, with a greedy leer, by Laurence Olivier in “Marathon Man.”)

But if you look past those knowingly overheated touches, most of the two hours and 39 minutes of “Elvis” is a relatively straight Elvis Presley biopic. I’m a big fan of music biopics, and many of the ones I love — like “Get on Up” or “The Buddy Holly Story” — are, in form and spirit, films of sturdy conventionality. So if “Elvis,” as a movie, has its roots in conventional dramatic soil, you might well ask: What would be the problem with that?

The problem is that Luhrmann, as exciting a filmmaker as he can be (at his best, he’s a fevered wizard of spangly cinematic voodoo), is not an artist who excels in the arena of conventional storytelling. The way this plays out in “Elvis” is that the entire first half of the movie is less a dramatization of Elvis Presley’s life than a kind of skittery illustration of it. We keep being told things about Elvis — the way his musical mojo was defined by his Southern immersion in the blues and gospel, the pressure put on him to trim back the sexual flamboyance of his stage persona. But the scenes aren’t written so that we experience them from Elvis’s point-of-view. Instead, we’re peering into the movie, more occupied than immersed, tethered to Hanks’ narration but watching it all from a distance.

That’s why Austin Butler ’s performance feels remote in the first half. The actor, I’m sorry, fundamentally lacks Elvis’ flashing-eyed danger (that’s one reason his performance gets so much better once the film enters the late ’60s, when Elvis no longer was dangerous). And if you leave aside the caffeinated cutting, much of the first half of “Elvis” has the one-thing-after-another prosaic vibe of an energized-but-not-better-than-that TV-movie.

Over the next few months, and heading into awards season, viewers and critics alike will debate whether “Elvis,” as a drama, is good or bad or just okay or “Oscar-worthy” or better than “Bohemian Rhapsody” or not as good as “Ray,” or whatever. It’s my feeling that the movie, scattered and imperfect as it is, is truly something to see. That’s why I’m cheered by the prospect of the movie’s success. “Elvis” is an event, a surfacy but coruscating vision of the life of one of the five most important cultural figures of the last 100 years. Why shouldn’t viewers all over the world flock to see it? I hope they do.

Take the montage that compresses Elvis’s movie career — and most of the ’60s, right up until the taping of his 1968 comeback special — into just two minutes of screen time. It’s clever; Luhrmann devised a way to streamline Elvis’s story. But to me he does it in a way that’s false to the Baz Luhrmann aesthetic. Why not spend some time reveling in the kitschy glory of “Viva Las Vegas” — and use Elvis’ movie career as a way to show how Col. Parker was already draining the life out of him? I think it’s odd that “Elvis” devotes so much time to the taping of the 1968 special, all to make the point that Parker wanted Elvis to wear a Christmas sweater and sing Christmas songs — while Elvis, instead, was undermining the colonel by getting back in touch with his roots. This section is fun as TV sociology, but once again we’re outside of Elvis. We don’t feel connected to his soul until the film arrives in Vegas, at which point it totally takes off.

Suddenly, Elvis is in his glory as a white-suited, karate-chopping, five-rings-on-his-fingers rock ‘n’ roll showbiz king. But he’s also in prison, with the colonel as his evil warden, who has chained him to a contract that will turn him into a pill-popping zombie (and therefore, yes, the colonel really did kill him). In its final third, “Elvis” ascends. It’s almost like this is where the movie really starts. The “Unchained Melody” scene at the end is nothing short of haunting.

What I really wish Luhrmann would have done, though, is to treat Elvis’ life in a more radical, stylized, Baz-tastic way. He could have turned “Jailhouse Rock” (a key moment for Elvis, though it isn’t even in the movie) into a show-stopping epiphany, and if the Elvis-the-pelvis-introduces-sex-to-America revolution of 1956 had been staged as less of a TV-biopic news-flash montage, complete with fake scandals (as if the real ones weren’t vivid enough), and as more of a delirious musical number, the songs could have been taken to a new level. It might even have felt like we hadn’t heard them before. Instead, Elvis’s music, right up until the Vegas section, gets blended into a kind of Elvis Presley smoothie.

If it sounds like I’m asking “Elvis” to be a different kind of movie than it is — well, I am. But here’s the thing: Lurhmann already eased down the rabbit hole of that kind of movie when he turned Col. Parker into a demonically accented, twinkly-eyed scamp of betrayal. Hanks has been unfairly savaged for his performance, which is a knowing piece of operatic villainy. But if that’s how you’re going to go, why not shoot the works? If “Elvis” had been a psychedelic rock dream play, like “Moulin Rouge!” with the King at its center, it might have been even more of a must-see. As it is, the movie, while eminently worth seeing, is caught between a rock biopic and a Baz place.

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“Elvis” brings all of the glitz, rhinestones, and jumpsuits you’d expect in an Elvis film, but without the necessary complexity for a movie from 2022 about the “King.”

Maximalist filmmaker Baz Luhrmann , who abhors visual restraint and instead opts for grand theatricality, should be the perfect creator for a Presley biopic, but isn't. Luhrmann tells us this icon’s story from the perspective of the singer’s longtime, crooked manager Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ). After collapsing in his tacky, memorabilia-filled office, a near-death Parker awakens alone in a Las Vegas hospital room. The papers have labeled him a crook, a cheat who took advantage of Elvis ( Austin Butler ), so he must set the record straight. 

From the jump, Luhrmann’s aesthetic language takes hold: An IV-drip turns into the Las Vegas skyline; in a hospital nightgown, Parker walks through a casino until he arrives at a roulette wheel. Carrying a heap of affectations, Hanks plays Parker like the Mouse King in “ The Nutcracker .” For precisely the film’s first half hour, "Elvis" moves like a Christmas fairytale turned nightmare; one fueled not by jealousy but the pernicious clutches of capitalism and racism, and the potent mixture they create. 

It’s difficult to wholly explain why “Elvis” doesn’t work, especially because for long stretches it offers rushes of enthralling entertainment. In the early goings-on, Luhrmann and co-writers Sam Bromell , Craig Pearce , and Jeremy Doner meticulously build around Presley’s influences. They explain how Gospel and Blues equally enraptured him—a well-edited, both visually and sonically, sequence mixes the two genres through a sweaty performance of “That’s Alright Mama”—and they also show how much his time visiting on Beale Street informed his style and sound. A performance of “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton ( Shonka Dukureh ), and the emergence of a flashy B.B. King ( Kelvin Harrison Jr.) furthers the point. Presley loves the superhero Shazam, and dreams about reaching the Rock of Eternity, a stand-in for stardom in this case. He’s also a momma’s boy (thankfully Luhrmann doesn’t belabor the death of Elvis’ brother, a biographical fact lampooned by “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”).  

Though a biopic veteran, Hanks has rarely been a transformative actor. In this case, you can hear his accent slipping back toward Hanks. And the heavy prosthetics do him few favors, robbing him of his facial range—an underrated tool in his repertoire. And Hanks already struggles to play outright villains; shaping the story from his perspective takes the edge off of his potential menace. It’s a tough line for Hanks to walk, to be unsuspecting yet vicious. Hanks creates a friction that doesn’t altogether work, but feels at home in Luhrmann’s heavy reliance on artifice. 

The most fascinating linkage in “Elvis” is the extrapolation of commerce and race. Parker is enamored by Presley because he plays Black music but is white. Elvis turns off the white Christian old, like the moribund country singer Hank Snow ( David Wenham ), and the homophobic men who consider him a “fairy.” Yet he excites the young, like Jimmie Rogers ( Kodi Smit-McPhee , both actors provide fantastic comic relief), and he has sex appeal. A wiggle, if you please. Luhrmann takes that wiggle seriously, showing sexually possessed, screaming women. Butler’s crotch, in precisely fitted pink pants and shot in close-up, vibrates. Harsh zooms, quick whip pans, and a taste for horniness (by both men and women) help make the early moments of this biopic so special. As does its anti-capitalist bent, which depicts how often labor, art, and ownership can be spit out and garbled in the destructive system.    

Unfortunately, “Elvis” soon slips into staid biopic territory. We see the meteoric rise of Presley, the mistakes—whether by greed or naïveté—he makes along the way, and his ultimate descent toward self-parody. His mother ( Helen Thomson ) dies on the most hackneyed of beats. His father ( Richard Roxburgh ) quivers in the shallowest of ways. Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ) appears and is handed standard tragic wife material. The pacing slows, and the story just doesn’t offer enough playfulness or interiority to keep up. 

But even so, the latter portions of Luhrmann’s film aren’t without its pleasures: The performance of “Trouble,” whereby Presley defies the Southern racists who fear his Black-infused music (and sensuality) will infiltrate white America, is arresting. Cinematographer Mandy Walker ’s freeze frames imitate black and white photography, like wrapping history in the morning dew. The performance of Elvis’ comeback special, specifically his rendition of “If I Can Dream” soars. During the Vegas sequences, the costumes become ever more elaborate, the make-up ever more garish, acutely demonstrating Presley’s physical decline. And Butler, an unlikely Elvis, tightly grips the reins by providing one show-stopping note after another. There isn’t a hint of fakery in anything Butler does. That sincerity uplifts “Elvis” even as it tumbles.    

But all too often the film slips into a great white hope syndrome, whereby Presley is the sincere white hero unearthing the exotic and sensual Black artists of his era. B.B. King, Big Momma Thornton, and Little Richard (real-life supporters of Presley) exist solely as either bulletin board cheerleaders or alluring beings from a far-off land. While these Black artists are championed—an awareness by Luhrmann of their importance and the long and winding history of Black art moving through white spaces—they barely speak or retain any depth, even while a paternalistic Presley advances their cause. 

The approach neither illuminates nor dignifies these figures. Instead, Luhrmann tries to smooth over the complicated feelings many Black folks of varied generations have toward the purported King. In that smoothing, Presley loses enough danger, enough fascinating complications to render the whole enterprise predictable. Because it’s not enough to merely have awareness, a filmmaker also has a responsibility to question whether they’re the right person to tell a story. Luhrmann isn’t. And that’s a failing that will be difficult for many viewers to ignore.

Luhrmann side-steps other parts of the Elvis mythology, including the age gap between Priscilla and Presley (the pair met in Germany when the former was 14 years old), and when Elvis became a stooge for Richard Nixon . Excluding the latter makes little sense in a movie concerning the commodification of Presley by capitalism and conservatism. Luhrmann wants to show the downfall of a doe-eyed icon by nefarious systems, but never pushes the envelope enough for him to become unlikable, or better yet, intricate and human. 

That flattening easily arises from telling this story from Colonel Parker’s perspective. He doesn’t care about Black people, therefore, they exist as cardboard cutouts. He cares little for Priscilla, therefore, she has little personhood. And Parker certainly isn’t going to tarnish the image or brand of Elvis because it corrodes himself. These undesirable outcomes, facile and pointless, make logical sense considering the framing of the narrative. But what good is making a sanitized Elvis biopic in 2022? And truly, who really needs a further fortification of Presley’s cultural importance when it’s been the dominant strain for over 60 years? It’s another noxious draft in history clumsily written by white hands.

“Elvis” certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions. Luhrmann always puts Butler in the best position to succeed until the credits, whereby he cuts to archival footage of Presley singing “Unchained Melody.” In that moment Luhrmann reminds you of the myth-making at play. Which is maybe a good thing, given Luhrmann's misleading, plasticine approach. 

Now playing in theaters.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Film credits.

Elvis (2022)

Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking.

159 minutes

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley

Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker

Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley

Dacre Montgomery as Steve Binder

Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King

Richard Roxburgh as Vernon Presley

Helen Thomson as Gladys Presley

Yola as Sister Rosetta Tharpe

David Wenham as Hank Snow

Luke Bracey as Jerry Schilling

Alex Radu as George Klein

Alton Mason as Little Richard

Xavier Samuel as Scotty Moore

Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jimmie Rodgers Snow

Natasha Bassett as Dixie Locke

Leon Ford as Tom Diskin

• Baz Luhrmann

Writer (story by)

• Jeremy Doner
• Sam Bromell
• Craig Pearce

Cinematographer

• Mandy Walker
• Jonathan Redmond
• Elliott Wheeler

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