Elvis (PG-13)

Elvis Aaron Presley gets the biopic treatment — sorta — in Elvis, the bonkers and exhausting movie from Baz Luhrmann.

We meet Elvis (Austin Butler, an absolute ball of magnetism in the middle of this thing) when he is a young musician, having just caught a break with the popularity of his recording of “That’s All Right” and still playing radio shows and county-fair-type events. It’s here that Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) first sees Elvis. Parker, who narrates the movie from his unreliable viewpoint, describes himself as basically a carnival showman always in search of an act that will draw the crowds and make them happy to fork over their money. When he watches Elvis sing and shake his hips and he sees women and girls in the audience all but lose their minds, Parker believes he has found the greatest show on Earth. First, he has to entangle Elvis in a crushing contract, which he does, winning over both Presley and his parents, Gladys (Helen Thomson) and Vernon (Richard Roxburg). Then he pulls him onto a traveling country music show. But the squaresville country performers don’t like sharing a stage with the “wild” Elvis and his music with its elements of Black musical styles. Young people might be going nuts for Elvis but the white establishment is way more interested in keeping segregation alive and well. The more popular Elvis gets, the more girls are hanging outside his window (and later outside the gates of Graceland), the more adult society seems determined to tamp him down, with threats to jail him if he continues his wiggling.

Parker, not particularly interested in Elvis’ music as art but extremely interested in Elvis’ performance contracts and various merchandising opportunities, tries to make Elvis more “family friendly” on a TV performance, dressed in formalwear and singing to a hound dog. Elvis rebels against the “New Elvis” and goes back to his preferred method of performance. Parker decides that the way for Elvis to ride out the firestorm is to accept being drafted into the U.S. Army; the haircut and two years of military service will prove that Elvis is a clean-cut all-American boy, Parker believes.

And it sort of works, with Elvis returning to show business with a wife, Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), and a career in Hollywood. But Elvis and Parker continue to clash over Elvis’ desire for more artistic fulfillment and Parker’s desire for commercial success — if The Beatles are where rock ’n’ roll is, how about make a Christmas album?

Throughout, we see how Elvis’ childhood (Chaydon Jay plays young Elvis), frequently living in Black neighborhoods and soaking in blues and gospel music, influenced his own talent. The movie directly shows the inspiration/appropriation aspect of Elvis’ music and how part of what made him such a draw, artistically and commercially, is that he was performing the music of Black artists such as Big Mama Thorton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in a way that fit with the rock of the era and was accepted by white audiences — younger white audiences, at least — in a segregated country. The argument of the movie on this score — at least I think this is the movie’s argument — is that Elvis is both an exceptional musical talent and someone who, because of the times he lived in, was able to take advantage of the artistry of these equally talented and more talented musicians who had few opportunities for Elvis-sized success.

This aspect of Elvis is one of the more engaging elements of the movie. I don’t know that it rights any historical wrongs but it gives some kind of spotlight to the original performers (or, at least, acknowledges that Elvis wasn’t coming up with this music in a vacuum) and that’s, you know, something. These scenes are often a little bonkers but they are interesting bonkers, which is what you hope for from a Baz Luhrmann movie.

Overall, however, I wish Elvis, which clocks in at two hours and 39 minutes, had been about 30 percent shorter and 40 percent more bonkers. When Baz Luhrmann is being weird or over the top or getting us right up next to sweaty Vegas Elvis to see him pour every bit of whatever’s left of himself into performances for, if not artistic fulfillment, a few moments of crowd adoration, Elvis is sort of fascinating. I mean, it also feels like a mess and I’m not fully sure I understand the story the movie is telling (or even if the movie knows what story it is telling) but at least in these scenes we are getting a portrait of a person, played by a person (Butler) who also feels like he’s going all in.

Then there is the whole deal with Hanks’ Tom Parker, with his extremely extreme nose (which I feel like we see A Lot of in shadow or in profile) and his whole crazy accent (which is I guess true-ish to life, it’s sort of Southern with a lot of Dutch inflection, “Parker” having been an invention of a carnival worker from the Netherlands who immigrated, without legal documents, in the late 1920s and then sometimes tried to pass himself off as being from West Virginia, Wikipedia explains). Hanks’ Parker is always leering from a shadow or slinking around, like he’s the devil who met this musician at the crossroads. But are we supposed to see him as some great villain? Or just a huckster whose goals sort-of aligned with Elvis’? There are a lot of facets to the character — his hazy background, his gambling problem that puts him in the debt of shady mob-types in Vegas, the air of neediness behind all the bluster. But I feel like the movie throws it all at us, similar to how it throws a lot of interesting music all together, without really pulling any character or theme into a coherent throughline in the movie. This movie about Elvis and told by Parker ends up being about both of them and neither of them.

So here are my takeaways from Elvis:

• Austin Butler is deeply compelling. Even when they’ve put him in some pretty silly sideburns, you can’t not watch him with all of your attention. He gives you a sense of how this random country-blues musician became Big Deal Elvis Presley and why he was still a good show even when the culture had sort of passed him by in the traditional rock sense.

• The soundtrack, both in the movie and the album, is weird but intriguing (Eminem makes a very purposeful appearance; think on that for a bit) and I’m definitely going to give it a listen. It almost pulls off that trick, like 2019’s Yesterday did with The Beatles, of letting you pull this extremely familiar music out of its place in your cultural consciousness and consider it anew.

• Baz Luhrmann is always interesting, even when it feels like parts of his movies are kind of a mess. This movie had me wanting to rewatch The Great Gatsby and Romeo + Juliet. He understands spectacle and presentation in a way that makes his movies fun to watch even if you’re not totally sure what you’re watching.

So, B?

Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Baz Luhrmann with a screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner, Elvis is two hours and 39 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Elvis