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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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Austin butler and tom hanks in baz luhrmann’s ‘elvis’: film review | cannes 2022.

The King of Rock and Roll gets suitably electrified biopic treatment in this kinetic vision of his life and career through the eyes of the financial abuser who controlled him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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How you feel about Baz Luhrmann ’s Elvis will depend largely on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s signature brash, glitter-bomb maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishing section alone — even before Austin Butler ’s locomotive hips start doing their herky-jerky thing when Elvis Presley takes to the stage to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” in a rockabilly-chic pink suit — leaves you dizzy with its frenetic blast of scorching color, split screen, retro graphics and more edits per scene than a human eye can count. Add in the stratified, ear-bursting sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.

If the writing too seldom measures up to the astonishing visual impact, the affinity the director feels for his showman subject is both contagious and exhausting. Luhrmann’s taste for poperatic spectacle is evident all the way, resulting in a movie that exults in moments of high melodrama as much as in theatrical artifice and vigorously entertaining performance.

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Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Release date: Friday, June 24 Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Director: Baz Luhrmann

As for the big question of whether Butler could pull off impersonating one of the most indelible icons in American pop-culture history, the answer is an unqualified yes. His stage moves are sexy and hypnotic, his melancholy mama’s-boy lost quality is swoon-worthy and he captures the tragic paradox of a phenomenal success story who clings tenaciously to the American Dream even as it keeps crumbling in his hands.

But the heart of this biopic is tainted, thanks to a screenplay whose choppy patchwork feel perhaps directly correlates to its complicated billing — by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner; story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. That mouthful suggests an amalgam of various versions, though the big hurdle is the off-putting character piloting the narrative, who creates a hole at its center.

That would be “Colonel” Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in arguably the least appealing performance of his career — a creepy, beady-eyed leer from under a mountain of latex, with a grating, unidentifiable accent that becomes no less perplexing even after the character’s murky Dutch origins have been revealed. It’s a big risk to tell your story through the prism of a morally repugnant egotist, a financial abuser who used his manipulative carnival-barker skills to control and exploit his vulnerable star attraction, driving him to exhaustion and draining him of an outsize proportion of his earnings.

Every time the action cuts back to Hanks’ Parker near the end of his life — refuting his designated role as the villain of the story from a Las Vegas casino floor where he ran up gambling debts that necessitated keeping Elvis under a lucrative International Hotel residency contract — the movie falters. As portrayed here and elsewhere, Parker was a self-serving con man who monopolized the star’s artistic and personal freedom and now gets to monopolize the retelling of his life. Elvis the movie works better when Elvis the man is a creation of ringmaster Luhrmann’s feverish imagination than when Parker keeps popping up to remind us, “I made Elvis Presley.”

The subject’s musical formation is illustrated in enjoyably florid Southern Gothic style as the young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) is seen growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, moving to a poor Black neighborhood after his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), is briefly jailed for passing a bad check.

Watching through the cracks in the walls of juke joints or from under the tent flaps of holy-roller revival meetings, Elvis absorbs influences that would allow him to fuse bluegrass with R&B, gospel and country, and create a sound unprecedented from a white vocalist. In one amusingly wild flourish, the roots of the “lewd gyrations” that would inflame screaming fans and conservative watchdogs in their respective ways are traced to the boy being physically possessed by the spirit during a religious service.

As they did in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere, Luhrmann and longtime music supervisor Anton Monsted freely mash up period and contemporary tunes once the teenage Elvis, his family by now relocated to Memphis, starts hanging out on Beale Street, where he befriends the young B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and thrills to the gospel sounds of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (English musician Yola). Given that Elvis’ vocal style drew from multiple inspirations, it makes sense for swaggering hip-hop and Elvis covers by a range of artists to weave their way into the soundtrack.

Initially enlisted by the Colonel to join a bill led by country crooner Hank Snow (David Wenham) and his son Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Elvis soon becomes the headliner, with Hank stepping away due to concerns that his Christian family audience might blanch at Presley’s heathen hip-swinging. But Elvis’ doting mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), who calms his nerves like no one else, reassures her son, “The way you sing is God-given, so there can’t be nothin’ wrong with it.”

The rapid-fire cutting of editors Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond allows Luhrmann to whip through the meteoric rise in popularity, the landing of an RCA recording contract and the encroaching threat of political morality police at the same time. Parker keeps the Presley family onside by making Vernon his son’s business manager, albeit without much clout or responsibility. Meanwhile, one of Elvis’ bandmates slips him a pill while on the road “to put the pep back in your step,” setting in motion a dependency that would famously spiral in later years.

Segregation rallies with alarmist warnings about “Africanized culture” and “crimes of lust and perversion” target Presley, and television appearances start coming with the stipulation of “no wiggling.” But Elvis’ fans don’t go for the cleaned-up, powered-down version; they want the excitement and danger that has female fans hurling their underwear at the stage. When Elvis gives them what they want, the Colonel fears he’s losing control of his meal ticket so he maneuvers to have him shipped off to serve in the U.S. Army in 1958 for an image makeover. Elvis blames his absence for his mother’s increased drinking and subsequent death, and yet Parker’s hold over him is too strong to shake.

By this point it’s clear that while the Colonel aggressively pushes himself forward as Elvis’ protector, he exhibits little to no genuine affection for his star client, regarding him merely as a revenue source. With Gladys gone, that leaves an emotional void around the title character, which may be true to life, but robs the film of immediacy. Even his marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) doesn’t do enough to counter that, which keeps Elvis remote just as Luhrmann should be drawing us in closer.

Too often, Luhrmann builds sequences like isolated vignettes rather than part of a consistently fluid narrative, for instance a romantic montage of Elvis and Priscilla in Germany during his military service, set to a pretty, wispy cover by Kasey Musgraves of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The sequence is sweet and dreamy, but it’s no substitute for getting to know Priscilla, a thinly drawn role beneath the hairdos and knockout fashions.

The action sprints forward through the rise and fall of Elvis’ movie career without lingering long (no Ann-Margret representation, sadly), but finds juicy detail in NBC’s 1968 comeback special. It’s conceived by Parker as a Christmas family special and a fresh merchandising opportunity for nerdy sweaters. But Elvis’ frustration with his career downturn causes him to take the advice of his old friend Jerry Schilling (Luke Bracey) and rework it on his own terms, angering Parker and the show’s sponsors at Singer.

Director Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery) reshapes the special, putting Elvis on a small stage surrounded by a TV audience. The raw rock ‘n’ roll set reaffirms Elvis’ influential place in American popular music just as he’s risking obsolescence. The recreated production numbers are a blast, with a gospel choir, “whorehouse” dancers and kung fu fighters. Elvis also shrugs off the Colonel’s insistence on closing with “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” instead performing the original protest song, “If I Can Dream,” which resonates powerfully just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The attention given in Elvis to the ’68 special suggests how much brighter Presley’s star might have burned had he gotten out from under Parker’s control more often. But when he tries to extricate himself, the Colonel convinces him to commit to five years at $5 million a year in Vegas, blocking the international touring plan of management team members who actually do appear to consider his wellbeing. Parker’s puppet-mastery is revealed to be about not just his gambling debts but also about his undocumented status in the U.S., which would have been exposed had he left the country.

Of course, this is ultimately a tragedy, and a different filmmaker less consumed by the bigness and brassiness of his enterprise might have dug deeper into the pathos. But there are moving moments, especially in Butler’s performance as he transforms into the puffy, sweaty Elvis of his final years (thankfully, his prosthetics are less of an eyesore than Hanks’), his marriage to Priscilla dissolving and causing sorrow for both of them.

One might wish for a biopic with more access to the subject’s bruised, bleeding heart, but in terms of capturing the essence of what made Presley such a super nova, Elvis gets many things right.

The live performance sequences are electrifying, shot by cinematographer Mandy Walker with swooping moves to match Presley’s dynamic physicality and with intimacy to capture the molten feeling he poured into his songs. The bold use of color and lighting is eye-popping. The same goes for the production design by Luhrmann’s wife and career-long collaborator Catherine Martin and Karen Murphy; likewise, Martin’s utterly fabulous costumes.

Luhrmann is often criticized for molding material to serve his style rather than finessing his style to fit the material. Many will dismiss this film’s unrelenting flamboyance as bombastic Baz in ADHD overdrive, a work of shimmering surfaces that refuses to stop long enough to get under its subject’s skin. But as a tribute from one champion of outrageous showmanship to another, it dazzles.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Warner Bros. Production companies: Bazmark, Jackal Group Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Davies, Charles Grounds, Josh McConville, Adam Dunn, Yola, Alton Mason, Gary Clark Jr., Shonka Dukureh, Chaydon Jay Director: Baz Luhrmann Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormack Director of photography: Mandy Walker Production designers: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy Costume designer: Catherine Martin Music: Elliott Wheeler Music supervisor: Anton Monsted Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond Visual effects supervisor: Thomas Wood Casting: Nikki Barrett

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Elvis Reviews

Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s best film since Moulin Rouge!, a frantic, kinetic and incredibly captivating biopic about the King of Rock and Roll.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

Director Baz Luhrmann’s sixth feature-length film “Elvis“ is officially the best superhero story of 2022.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

Elvis is a powerhouse of music, superb performances, and immaculate filmmaking. It’s a religious experience of a film. A spiritual exercise in movie making. One of the best films of the year – any year.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2024

The first twenty-some-odd minutes of this film is masterful at completely and utterly overloading the viewer.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 19, 2024

Luhrmann overlooks a lot of the horrible things that happened during his legacy to create a version that is worthy of the big screen.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

There is no doubt in my mind that Elvis is a fine tribute that many fans won't regret watching, but it just gets in its own way and doesn't manage to stand as an exceptional one.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2023

The film gets in its way but is a good start for Butler’s growing career.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

The triumph of Elvis comes in the form of lead actor Austin Butler, who embodies the King from start to finish. Butler's performance brings life to an often cartoonish man, selling his soul to director Baz Luhrmann's trademark flash and flair.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Elvis is a strong effort from everyone involved, and is worth watching for Butler alone; he is a star. It's a wild ride that will undoubtedly provide fun, laughter and toe-tapping happiness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

Colonel Parker describes Elvis as “the greatest show on earth.” If Butler’s performance manages to capture even an ounce of Elvis’ magic, Colonel Parker might just have been right.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Austin Butler stars in a sensory experience so flashy and grandiose that it can only be described by the feeling it evokes: nausea.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 21, 2023

It also shows Luhrmann continuing to swing for the fences. His "Elvis" captures the enormity of this pop culture phenomenon, with enough chutzpah to overcome the bumps in the road.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Here’s the key problem: there are effectively two films playing out at the same time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Apr 12, 2023

There’s just no reason for its nearly 160-minute runtime; but the music is fantastic.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 31, 2023

Butler here is a co-auteur in a way usually closed to biopics in which the lead actors are more famous than Butler is, and so we never lose them in their roles as other famous people.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Another flat one sided look at a rock idol that’s never bold enough to challenge our perceptions of them.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2023

Rarely do we see a performance that is so electric that as soon as the film gets over, one rushes to search about the actor instead.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

A dazzling opulence of color, set design, and musical presentations.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 24, 2023

Butler’s explosive interpretation of Elvis – from the physical gesticulations to the big, burly voice – humanized The King, pulling down the bright lights to show us the distressed man behind the immortal God of Rock.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2023

...a disappointing misfire that squanders its host of appealing attributes.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 7, 2023

‘Elvis’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic, Starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, Is a Stylishly On-the-Surface Life-of-Elvis Impersonation Until It Takes Off in Vegas

It's a spectacle that keeps us watching but doesn't nail Elvis's inner life until he's caught in a trap.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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Elvis Presley , with the exception of the Beatles, is the most mythological figure in the history of popular music. That makes him a singularly tempting figure to build a biopic around. But it also makes telling his story a unique challenge. Everything about Elvis (the rise, the fall, all that came in between) is so deeply etched in our imaginations that when you make a dramatic feature film out of Elvis Presley’s life, you’re not just channeling the mythology — you’re competing with it. The challenge is: What can you bring to the table that’s headier and more awesome than the real thing?

Baz Luhrmann ’s “Elvis” is a fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream — a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera. Luhrmann, who made that masterpiece of romantically downbeat razzle-dazzle “Moulin Rouge!” (and in 20 years has never come close to matching it), isn’t interested in directing a conventional biography of Elvis. And who would want him to? Luhrmann shoots the works, leaping from high point to high point, trimming away anything too prosaic (Elvis’s entire decade of churning out bland Hollywood musicals flashes by in an eye-blink). He taps into the Elvis of our reveries, searing us with the king’s showbiz heat and spinning his music — and how it was rooted in the genius of Black musical forms — like a mix-master across time.

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Yet “Elvis,” for all its Luhrmannian fireworks, is a strange movie — compelling but not always convincing, at once sweeping and scattershot, with a central figure whose life, for a long stretch, feels like it’s being not so much dramatized as illustrated.

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Austin Butler , the 30-year-old actor who plays Elvis, has bedroom eyes and cherubic lips and nails the king’s electrostatic moves. He also does a reasonably good impersonation of Elvis’s sultry velvet drawl. Yet his resemblance to Elvis never quite hits you in the solar plexus. Butler looks more like the young John Travolta crossed with Jason Priestly, and I think the reason this nags at one isn’t just because Elvis was (arguably) the most beautiful man of the 20th century. It’s also that Butler, though he knows how to bring the good-ol’-boy sexiness, lacks Elvis’s danger . Elvis had a come-hither demon glare nestled within that twinkle of a smile. We’ve lived for half a century in a world of Elvis impersonators, and Butler, like most of them, has a close-but-not-the-real-thing quality. He doesn’t quite summon Elvis’s inner aura of hound-dog majesty.

Luhrmann has always had the fearlessness of his own flamboyance, and from the first moments of “Elvis,” which take off from an outrageous bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. logo, the film lets us know that it’s going to risk vulgarity to touch the essence of the Elvis saga. There’s a luscious opening fanfare of split-screen imagery, showing us how Elvis loomed at every stage, but mostly as the decadent Vegas showman who flogged his own legend until it was (no pun intended) larger-than-life.

But the way that Butler comes off as more harmless than the real Elvis ties into the key problem with the film’s first half. Luhrmann is out to capture how Elvis, the smoldering kid whose hip-swiveling, leg-jittering gyrations knocked the stuffing out of our sexual propriety, with his thrusts and his eyeliner and his inky black hair falling over his face, was a one-man erotic earthquake who remade the world. Yet Elvis’s transformation of the world was, in fact, so total and triumphant that it may now be close to impossible for a movie to capture how radical it was. With its over-the-top shots of women at Elvis’s early shows erupting into spontaneous screams, or throwing underwear onstage, plus scandalous headlines and finger-wagging moral gatekeepers growing hysterical over how Elvis was busting down racial barriers or promoting “indecency,” “Elvis” keeps telling us that it’s about an insurrectionary figure. The irony is that Luhrmann’s style is too ripely sensual, too post-Elvis, to evoke what the world was like before Elvis.

We see Elvis as a boy sneaking into a Black tent-show revival, fusing with the writhing gospel he encounters there, or hearing Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) sing “That’s All Right Mama” in a slow high blues wail. Then we hear what Elvis did with that music, syncing it to his own speedy spirit. Elvis stole the blues, all right, or at least borrowed them, but the movie shows us how he frosted them with a bouncy layer of country optimism and his own white-boy exhibitionism. The film dunks us in Elvis’s blue-suede bliss and then checks us, after a while, into his heartbreak hotel. In a way, though, I wish that Luhrmann had told Elvis’s story in the insanely baroque, almost hallucinogenic fashion of “Moulin Rouge!” For all the Elvis tunes on the soundtrack, the film doesn’t have enough musical epiphanies — scenes that blow your mind and heart with their rock ‘n’ roll magic.

And what “Elvis” never quite shows us, at least not until its superior second half, is what was going on inside Elvis Presley. For a while, the film plays like a graphic novel on amphetamines, skittering over the Elvis iconography but remaining playfully detached from his soul. Instead, it filters his story through the point-of-view of his Mephistophelean manager Svengali, Col. Tom Parker, who is played by Tom Hanks , under pounds of padding and a hideous comb-over, as a carny-barker showman with a hooked nose and a gleam of evil in his eye.

By framing “Elvis” as if it were Parker’s self-justifying story, the movie structures itself as a tease: Will it really show us that Parker, as he claims in his voice-over narration, has been given a bum rap by history? That he not only made Presley’s career but had his best interests at heart? No, it will not. Yet Luhrmann, in presenting the Dutch-born, never legally emigrated Parker (née Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk) as a master flimflam artist who saw himself as the P.T Barnum of rock ‘n’ roll, revels in a certain fascinating ambivalence. Hanks, with his mustache-twirling accent and avaricious gleam, makes Parker a cousin to Jim Broadbent’s nightclub impresario in “Moulin Rouge!” — a corrupt showman who will do and say anything to keep the show going. Parker latches onto Elvis in 1955, then stage manages his career to within an inch of its life. Elvis, turned into the Colonel’s hard-working show horse, becomes a victim of Stockholm syndrome; no matter how much he sees through the Colonel’s schemes, he can’t bring himself to quit him. Yet he spends the rest of his life rebelling against him.

The movie shows us how Elvis’s career, after its volcano eruption in the mid-’50s, became a series of defeats and escapes. To calm the controversies that Elvis first inspired, the Colonel repackages him as “the new Elvis” (read: a singer of family-friendly ballads), which only makes Elvis miserable. To further defuse the attacks upon him, Parker, in 1958, encourages Elvis to go into the Army as a way to clean up his image. Stationed in Germany, Elvis meets the teenage Priscilla — but it’s one of the film’s telling flaws that the actress who plays her, Olivia DeJonge, registers strongly in an early scene but scarcely has the chance to color in her performance. Given the film’s epic ambition, the script of “Elvis” (by Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) is a weirdly bare-bones affair. Hanks delivers a performance that’s a luscious piece of hambone duplicity, but why aren’t there more piercingly written scenes between Elvis and the Colonel? Or Elvis and Priscilla? The Colonel should have been a great character, not a succulent trickster cartoon. If these relationships had been enriched, the story might have taken off more.

That Luhrmann compresses most of the 1960s into a two-minute campy montage, which parodies Elvis’s life as if it were one of his movies, is the clearest sign that “Elvis” is no orthodox biopic. The film’s second act leaps ahead to Elvis’s 1968 comeback special — the filming of it, and the backstage politics, which involve Parker promising NBC that they’re going to be getting a Christmas special, a plan we see undermined at every turn by Elvis and the show’s director, Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery). The comeback special was, of course, a triumph, but the way Luhrmann tries to package it as a drama of sneaky rebellion doesn’t quite come off.

What comes off with startling power is the final third of the movie, which is set in Las Vegas during Elvis’s five-year residence at the International Hotel. For years, it became a cliché to mock Elvis for having embraced the shameless Middle American vulgarity of Vegas: the shows that opened with the “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fanfare from “2001,” the karate moves, the brassy orchestral sound of songs like his reconfigured “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And, of course, he was on drugs the whole time. What Luhrmann grasps is that the Vegas years, in their white-suited glitz way, were trailblazing and stupendous — and that Col. Parker, in his greedy way, was a showbiz visionary for booking Elvis into that setting. The film captures how Elvis did some of his greatest work as a singer there, apotheosized by the avid ecstasy of “Burning Love.”

Yet as “Elvis” dramatizes, Vegas also became Presley’s prison, because Parker nailed him to a merciless contract, and for the most scurrilous of motivations: The Colonel needed Elvis at the International to pay off his own mountainous gambling debts, even if that meant that the singer, offstage (and, ultimately, onstage), became a slurry, pill-popping ghost of himself. Our identification with Elvis only deepens as we realize that he’s “caught in a trap.” The film’s richest irony is that Butler’s performance as the young Elvis (the one who’s far closer to his own age) is an efficient shadow of the real thing, but his performance as the aging, saddened Elvis, who rediscovered success but lost everything, is splendid. He’s alive onstage more than he was doing “Hound Dog,” and offstage, for the first time in the movie, Elvis becomes a wrenching human being. Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.

Reviewed at Warner Bros. Screening Room (Cannes Film Festival, Out of Competition), May 13, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 159 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a Bazmark Production, Jack Group Production production. Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss. Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormick.
• Crew: Director: Baz Luhrmann. Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Camera: Mandy Walker. Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond. Music: Elliott Wheeler, Elvis Presley.
• With: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Dacre Montgomery, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Gary Clark Jr.

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Review: Austin Butler is the King incarnate in Baz Luhrmann’s manic, hip-swiveling ‘Elvis’

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Why hasn’t there been a great Elvis biopic yet? Well, Austin Butler wasn’t around to star as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. At the center of Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling pop epic “Elvis,” a film as opulent and outsize as the King’s talent and taste, Butler delivers a fully transformed, fully committed and star-making turn as Elvis Presley. The rumors are true: Elvis lives, in Austin Butler .

Swirling around Butler’s bravura performance is a manic, maximalist, chopped-and-screwed music biopic in which Luhrmann locates Elvis as the earth-shaking inflection point between the ancient and the modern, the carnival and the TV screen, a figure of pure spectacle who threatened to obliterate the status quo — and did. Luhrmann takes Presley’s legacy, relegated to a Las Vegas gag, and reminds us just how dangerous, sexy and downright revolutionary he once was. He makes Elvis relevant again.

Butler leaves it all on the screen, embodying the raw, unbridled sexual charisma of Elvis onstage. He is jaw-dropping, nearly feral in his portrayal of Presley’s most memorable musical performances, from his early days to his 1968 comeback special and his Vegas shows, and Luhrmann shoots and edits these scenes to capture not just Butler’s performance up close but also the powerful impact Elvis had on his fans.

Written by Luhrmann, Jeremy Doner, Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce, the film crams Elvis’ entire career into two hours and 39 minutes of breathless filmmaking, focusing on the energy and emotional beats of Elvis’ journey, as well as his exploitation at the hands of his manager, Col. Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks , heavily made up in prosthetics).

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Luhrmann editorializes on top of that, using a heavy hand in the edit to continually remind us of Elvis’ roots and motivations, and the cultural importance of his ground-breaking career. Contemporary music on the soundtrack links Presley’s performance of Black music to the popularity of modern hip-hop; snippets of Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears hits remind us that Elvis paved the way for teen idols and that his story is also a cautionary tale.

The first part of the film, focusing on his breakout as a pretty white boy from Memphis, Tenn., who sang the blues, is fast, loose and dynamic, a whirlwind of honky-tonks, tent revivals, Beale Street blues and country music shows. The pace is frantic; it can’t sit still in the same way that Elvis can’t keep still when he’s singing, overcome by the music. Cinematographer Mandy Walker’s camera never stops moving, pulling us into this whirlwind of newfound fame, the wheels of the machine turning faster than Elvis can keep up.

The speed and overstimulation is heady and intoxicating, a stark aesthetic and emotional contrast to later chapters in Elvis’ career. The Hollywood days are a montage of color and costume, an inauthentic facade, as he sells out to corporations and the bottom line. In the last section, Elvis is stultified and oppressed, sapped of color and life, isolated in his “golden cage” at the International Hotel in Vegas.

The story is told from Parker’s perspective, a curious choice, though it serves a greater narrative purpose. From his perspective, we understand the spectacle that is Elvis; the colonel nearly licks his chops at the sight of this newest carnival attraction: a handsome, erotic, racial-boundary-crossing young man with a rough croon and a jet-black forelock who can make teenage girls scream. With visions of merchandise dancing in his head, the colonel turns Elvis into a global icon, but as “Elvis” argues at every turn, the colonel tamed the singer’s unruliness and artfulness, forcing him into cheesy movie musicals and relentless touring.

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Parker is the architect of Elvis’ downfall, extracting everything he can, clipping his wings, sanding down this culture-shifting force and offering him up as a titillating morsel of entertainment, the soul behind the talent tossed into the money-making machine and ground to dust.

The colonel’s narration and Hanks’ cartoonishly evil performance serve as a signed confession of guilt, as Luhrmann gives us Elvis as a Christ-like figure, a sainted martyr of rock ’n’ roll crucified on the cross of capitalism and greed.

While Butler humanizes Elvis, Luhrmann deifies him and argues that he possessed far more radical potential, both musically and politically, than he was allowed. His swiveling hips and jiggling knees weren’t just a portent of boy bands and pop icons to come — “Elvis the Pelvis” also threatened to usher in the sexual revolution and desegregate the South all at once, pushing rock ’n’ roll into the mainstream while starting the very first “culture war.”

“Elvis” isn’t just a reinvigoration of the Elvis myth. It’s also a resurrection of the King himself. Left the building? Not if Baz Luhrmann has anything to say about it.

Rating: PG-13, for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking Running time: 2 hours, 39 minutes Playing: In general release June 24

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Elvis Review

Baz luhrmann's loving, kinetic chronicle of the rise and fall of an american icon..

Elvis made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. It opens in theaters June 24.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis tells the story of the King of Rock & Roll at the speed of light, as jittery and alive with energy as young Presley himself was when he’d take the stage back in the 1950s and gyrate the crowd into a frenzy. There are times when that is absolutely the best approach— even with some notable omissions from his life story, there is a lot covered here — but Luhrmann’s film would have benefited from stopping to catch its breath more than it does. It’s that inconsistency and occasionally troubled pacing that prevents Elvis from reaching the dizzying heights it’s striving for, but, as a lifelong Elvis fan, this heartfelt take asks the right questions about its subject and makes it clear why Elvis’ contribution to American pop culture remains so lasting and important.

At the center of it all is a star-making, Oscar-worthy performance by Austin Butler, who nails Presley’s voice (he does a lot of his own singing in the ‘50s sequences and is quite good!) and mannerisms, even if his resemblance to Elvis varies at times. Butler is not going for mimicry here. There’s a light behind his eyes that reveals an intense immersion in Elvis the man; it’s almost cliche to say an actor is channeling the real person they’re playing, but Butler’s nuanced, human portrayal captures the lip-curling superficial elements one expects to see from Elvis while also revealing the passionate dreamer and ultimately broken soul inside him. Hopefully, Butler won’t be overlooked come awards time as Rocketman ’s Taron Egerton was.

It must be noted that Elvis himself isn’t the entry point to his own movie. No, Elvis the film is largely a two-hander between Butler’s Presley and a prosthetics-laden Tom Hanks as his longtime manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker. This story begins and (sort of) ends with Parker, a shifty con-man with a mysterious past whose hold on Elvis is the main subject of scrutiny here. How did this slovenly carnival barker get his hooks so deeply into one of the biggest stars of the 20th century? And why did Elvis stay with him even when he wanted him gone so that his career could soar even higher?

There are several answers explored here but the Colonel’s ability to snow people — he is referred to as “the snowman” several times, even by Elvis — is fully on display as he manipulates Elvis’ emotions and desire to never return to the poverty from which he came. While his Bond villain-esque accent grows wearisome ( the real Colonel's accent wasn't quite like that ), there’s a (spoilerish) reason for it and Hanks excels at playing this conniving character out to achieve his own American Dream. Elvis as merchandising machine (and Parker’s meal ticket) is at times amusingly explored, such as when Parker convinces Elvis they should sell “I Hate Elvis” buttons (why should anyone else profit from disliking him?). Casting Hanks — America’s Dad and keeper of the Baby Boomer flame — as the cunning antagonist in a film about America set across the same decades that Forrest Gump covered proves a deliciously subversive move.

Every Elvis Actor Ever

Since the film is framed around Parker, we don’t get a full-on look at adult Elvis until later in Act One. There are glimpses of him from afar and snippets of his voice, but we, like Parker, don’t see Elvis in full until he takes the stage at the Louisiana Hayride and sends the women in the audience into a sexual frenzy . The (at that time) vulgar and shocking nature of it all immediately captures Parker, an old carnival barker who knows a profitable freak show when he sees it.

Because it spans a few decades (from the mid-‘40s to the mid-‘70s), Luhrmann — never a storyteller to dilly-dally too long in any scene — steers his film like a Mystery Train that could derail at any moment. Thankfully, it doesn’t, but that breakneck speed doesn’t leave much time to emotionally take stock of certain major events, such as the death of Elvis’ beloved mother, Gladys (a melancholy, anxious Helen Thomson). We witness the aftermath of her death but for the worst tragedy of Elvis’ life, her actual demise is handled in as much time as a commercial break.

Outside of Elvis and the Colonel, most of the other characters are thinly sketched, including father Vernon Presley (Moulin Rouge!’s Richard Roxburgh) and wife Priscilla (whose courtship is sped through probably to dodge the problematic nature of a grown man becoming involved with a minor). As Priscilla, Olivia DeJonge gets a few decent scenes later in the film, but there’s not really as much depth given to Priscilla’s relationship with Elvis as is deserved. Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery, however, gets a decent amount of screen time as Steve Binder, the TV director who helmed the 1968 Comeback Special that restarted Elvis’ musical career and restored him to his badass rocker roots after a long spell in lame Hollywood movie vehicles.

The Comeback Special also allows for a fair degree of humor as Parker assures network execs it is actually a Christmas special and that Elvis will wear a gaudy sweater and sing wholesome Yuletide tunes (he doesn’t). This and an earlier ‘50s sequence where Elvis defies a police warning to not so much as wiggle his pinkie onstage showcase Elvis as a rebel trying to break free from the softening of his image by the Colonel, who wants to rebrand him as a wholesome, All-American family entertainer (Elvis’ stints in the US Army and Hollywood eventually accomplish that). But even when Elvis wins (against the Colonel’s wishes), he ultimately loses – and that’s the tragedy at the heart of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.

I’ve seen every movie and miniseries ever made about Elvis Presley and have always been frustrated at how much they neglected to address the role that Black culture and music played in his personal and professional development — as well as how dangerous Elvis was considered to be back then for crossing racial boundaries and challenging the sexual mores of the segregated 1950s. Not so in Luhrmann’s film, which gives Black artists’ contributions to American music and to Elvis himself a far greater role than they have ever had before in any prior project about him. It is long overdue and, hopefully, many of these Black artists and musical trailblazers will also get the big-screen biopic treatment they deserve.

The likes of B.B. King, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Mahalia Jackson, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and Big Mama Thornton all appear as characters in the film , while the soundtrack includes modern remixes and new music by artists such as Doja Cat to make the linkage across generations and cultures clearer to modern viewers of all races. Elvis the film — which was produced with consent from the Presley estate — is certainly operating as a response to the long and widely held view that Elvis simply stole Black music and profited from it .

Luhrmann’s film takes pains to show Elvis' upbringing as a poor white kid living among poor African Americans in Tupelo, Mississippi, and how Black juke joints and gospel music revivals hooked him at a tender age. This film’s Elvis clocks in a lot of time on Memphis’ Beale Street (“the Home of the Blues”) and at the Handy Club, where he openly acknowledges the talents and influences Black artists have had on him.

If anything, Elvis the movie almost over-corrects in its attempt to reframe Elvis within the era of the Civil Rights Movement. You would think he marched with MLK but he didn’t. Elvis himself never wrote a memoir, never did an in-depth Rolling Stone interview or a Dick Cavett talk show appearance like many other stars of that era did. His story has been told by everyone else and much discourse has formed to fill in the holes in the narrative of his personal views. Luhrmann’s film, however, might lead one to assume Elvis was far less conservative than he was. (Elvis, after all, once traveled to the White House by himself to ask President Nixon for a federal narcotics agent badge for his personal collection so he could play his part in the war on drugs.)

The film wonderfully showcases Elvis’ love of music, presenting it as his first true love (as much as he yearns to also be a great actor). Butler deftly conveys that passion and glee Elvis felt for music, particularly when he’s seen conducting his band to deliver just the right level of near-ecclesiastical fervor he needs in order to perform at his best. The artist element of Elvis has often been glossed over in the many biopics made about him. While even more of that would’ve been appreciated here, at least Luhrmann’s instincts prove right in showing the influence music, in general, had on Elvis and what it truly meant to him as a form of expression. (The film also nicely plays up Elvis' love of comic books , making him into an OG fanboy.)

Everything from Elvis’ dance moves and specific mannerisms to the clothing he wore in iconic photos is meticulously replicated here. Ditto Memphis’ Beale Street and the stage of the Vegas Hilton (although his home, Graceland, isn’t shown quite as much as might be expected). Much of the film is set on the road, especially in the last half as Elvis’ incessant touring, drug use, and divorce from Priscilla take a hefty toll on him. Luhrmann and his team deserve kudos for their near-slavish attention to detail throughout, something non-Elvis fans may take for granted but those of us who have watched the ‘68 Comeback Special or Elvis: That’s the Way It Is multiple times will surely appreciate its precision and fidelity.

Elvis’ drug-addled downfall arrives late in the film. Although his drug usage is first hinted at in a scene set in the ‘50s, it’s not until the end stages — when his place as a long-standing Vegas attraction has been sealed like a tomb — that we see Elvis the TV set-shooting, lyrics-slurring, hothead emerge. Presley’s actual drug usage had been happening for a long time before that but scenes of the Colonel and Elvis’ personal physician “Dr. Nick” doing whatever it takes to make sure he stays on tour and taking the stage in Vegas ultimately prove heartbreaking as Elvis resigns himself to blacking out windows to keep out the sunlight, hiding behind dark glasses, and letting uppers and downers dictate his daily behavior. It makes for an ultimately tragic story, not that dying at 42 years old allows much room for an upbeat conclusion.

What's Your Favorite Rock Star Biopic?

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a dizzying and at times even overwhelming chronicle of the rock icon. Austin Butler is stellar as Elvis, giving it his absolute all in every scene; truly, a star is born here. Tom Hanks cleverly plays against type as the manipulative and greedy Colonel Parker, a huckster who lucked into being the manager of what he saw as the greatest carnival freak show ever. While the supporting cast isn’t given as many dimensions as they could have been in say, a TV miniseries, Luhrmann tells Presley's story on a grand scale suited only for the big screen, delivering an epic yet intimate maelstrom of emotions, music, ideas, and eye candy. The film’s breathless pacing may befit the fevered lifestyle of a rock star, but it can also rush through necessary moments of dramatic reflection. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a wild ride clearly made with a big hunk o' love for its subject, and that zeal for capturing Presley’s humanity, both by its director and its star, outweighs the film’s excesses and shortcomings in the end.

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Cannes review: Electrifying Elvis delivers the icon like never before

Director Baz Luhrmann recaptures his Moulin Rouge! mojo with a hip-swiveling profile loaded with risk and reward.

Senior Editor, Movies

Can it be that we really don't know Elvis anymore — not as the seismic force that shook people and remade the popscape? Barring those who actually lived through it (a group to be envied), that's almost certainly the case. Baz Luhrmann 's Elvis , a dazzling, splatter-paint evocation of the myth and the man, does a mighty job of bringing us closer to what that revolutionary moment must have felt like. It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes 's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine , the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.

Luhrmann, an inspired stylist who somehow managed to freshen up The Great Gatsby , doesn't make us wait long for the first of these jolts. Before unleashing a glimpse of his Presley, we hear the voice emanating off a percolating debut single, "That's All Right," then we follow a shadowy figure taking the stage at a 1954 concert, the emphasis on mystery and discovery. By the time Austin Butler stares down the lens and melts it (his revelatory performance, fully lived-in and vulnerable, never plays like imitation), Luhrmann has hooked us by the strangeness of it all: the slicked hair, the androgynous makeup, the girls in the audience uncontrollably leaping to their feet.

Already we've seen Elvis' snoozy country-music competition ( Kodi Smit-McPhee plays one of these casualties, almost a fan-fictional variation on his gangly creation from The Power of the Dog ), and there's no contest. "It was the greatest carnival attraction I'd ever seen," murmurs narrating uber-manager-to-be Colonel Tom Parker (a stunty, half-successful Tom Hanks ), and a thesis snaps into place, one that Luhrmann, himself an impresario, develops in a screenplay credited to him and three other contributing writers: This is story about salesmanship, onstage and off.

Elvis crystallizes as a media-minded showdown between Parker's product manager — he convinces the naïve Presley to commit exclusively on a Ferris wheel, if the circus metaphor wasn't clear enough — and an increasingly willful and visionary artist. Luhrmann's filmmaking style follows suit, beginning in a flurry of look-at-me zip pans and crotch zooms, Presley making his meteoric way up the marquee posters, then deepening into intense fourth-wall piercings as Butler's Elvis thirsts for authenticity. (The director's ear for jolting modern musical juxtapositions remains in full flower, with new contributions by Doja Cat , Shonka Dukureh and Gary Clark Jr. , among others; Presley's own classics are creatively remixed, covered, and sometimes even modulated into minor keys.)

Not a perfect lookalike (and that's fine), Butler does extremely well by the music and stage moves, but he's even more compelling during Presley's post-Army Hollywood years, presented as dissatisfied ones. Elvis has an extended centerpiece that you can't quite believe arrives in a major studio movie: a behind-the-scenes exfoliation of Presley's landmark 1968 TV comeback special, during which Parker's dreams of wholesome Christmas entertainment collide with an increasingly politicized singer, shaken by the recent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ("He's not even wearing the sweater!" a panicky executive barks in the control room, confronted by Butler's leather-clad, gospel-belting Presley.)

As fun as Elvis often is, it scores some remarkably sharp points, particularly regarding Presley's unfaked love of Black musicians, and the appropriations that fueled his crossover success. Of the many biopics to enshrine the King (and Elvis eclipses them all), none has featured a triple split-screen montage charting the performance of a single song back to its blues-shack roots. (Even the serious Presley documentaries don't cement the point as clearly as Luhrmann does.) "Too many people are making too much money to put you in jail," a shrewd B.B. King ( Waves ' Kelvin Harrison Jr.) tells Presley at one of his low points; the line is scalding.

For a filmmaker sometimes criticized for skimming the surface, Luhrmann uses the material to go as deep as he does wide. Sometimes Elvis feels like a lost Oliver Stone film from his daring 1990s heyday: a big-canvas exploration of debauched American appetites. Fittingly, the Las Vegas years slacken a bit, televisions getting bulleted and pills chased. Still, Luhrmann makes room for Nixonian paranoia, especially in one hushed conversation with estranged wife Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ). "I never made a classic film I could be proud of," Elvis, a James Dean fan, tells her. Fans of Blue Hawaii will wince, but something equally rare has come to pass — a portrait of a serious man trapped in an unserious life. Grade: A–

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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann’s sweaty, seductive biopic makes the King cool again

In luhrmann’s fairytale vision, elvis’ manager (tom hanks) is the evil stepmother, while austin butler’s king is the princess locked in a tower, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Shonka Dukureh . 12A, 160 minutes.

If we were to pull back the curtain on Elvis Presley, what would we even want to see? A soul stripped of its performance? Something cold and real behind the kitsch? I’m not convinced. America’s pop icons aren’t merely shiny distractions. They’re a culture talking back to itself, constantly interrogating its own ideals and its desires. I don’t think who Elvis was is necessarily more important than what Elvis represents. And, while you won’t find all that much truth in Baz Luhrmann ’s cradle-to-grave dramatisation of his life, the Australian filmmaker has delivered something far more compelling: an American fairytale.

“I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” utters Tom Hanks ’s Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, as the curtain rises (literally) on Luhrmann’s expansive, rhinestone-encrusted epic. “And yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story,” he adds.

Parker, who saw early promise in Elvis’s politically radical blend of country and R’n’B, slyly positioned himself as the sole overseer of the star’s creative enterprise – the man who won him a recording contract with RCA Records, who secured his merchandising deals and TV appearances, and who navigated him through a fairly brief but bountiful acting career. But Parker took far more in return. In 1980, a judge ruled that he had defrauded the Presley estate by millions. Some even blame him for pushing an overworked Elvis to the brink and ultimately contributing to his death.

For Luhrmann, the fairytale parallels couldn’t be more obvious. Parker is the evil stepmother, Elvis (here played by former child star Austin Butler ) is the princess locked in her tower – if that tower is, in fact, the vast and gilded stage of his Las Vegas residency. When Parker, a former carnival worker, first seduces Elvis to become his client, it’s in a literal hall of mirrors. That may sound a little absurd, but Luhrmann’s roots in the Australian opera scene have granted him a winning (though, to some, divisive) ability to deliver baroque stylings with a sincere, romantic sensibility.

I’ve always believed strongly in the purpose and necessity of Luhrmann’s outlandish visions – that it’s not enough simply to capture the grotesque consumption of The Great Gatsby ’s Jazz Age, but to prove that we, the audience, would be as weak to its charms as Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Nick Carraway. The same is true here, in the ways his subject is both seduced and betrayed by his own fame. And, anyway, Luhrmann’s always shot his films a little like Elvis performs – sweaty and kinetic, as the camera sweeps through the corridors of Graceland and through decades of his life with the fury of a thousand karate kicks.

​​Elvis will, and should, invite serious discussions about the musician’s outstanding legacy, and the film’s weakest spots speak mostly to how unsettled the debate around him still is. There’s certainly a lot to be said for how nervously the film tiptoes around his relationship with Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), who was 14 when they first met. Can a film speak on behalf of a woman who’s still alive and able to share her own story? And where do we settle on the great debate of Elvis’s wider role in music history? Was his success really another chapter in white America’s long history of cultural appropriation, or did that early, rebellious appeal in fact prove to be a surprisingly powerful tool in the fight against segregation?

Luhrmann’s film arguably offers the most plausible, romantic ideal of Elvis, even if it turns him into something of a naïf trapped under Parker’s spell. He is always, in Parker’s narration, referred to as “the boy” and never “the man”. He is the sweet-souled, blue-eyed momma’s boy who just wants to buy his family a Cadillac and play the music of his childhood, which was spent in the Black-majority communities of Mississippi. Even at the height of Elvis’s fame, the film is careful to constantly bring us back to the Black artists who inspired him, either through the musician’s own words (and he was always deferential to his origins, to the very end) or through Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond’s frenetic editing work. When singer-songwriter Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) launches into her rendition of “Hound Dog”, a voice on the radio commands us to listen – this is the voice of Black America speaking.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war. Parker thinks he can turn him into a clean-cut, all-American boy for the white middle classes, compelling him to accept the draft, cut his locks, and go to war. Elvis resists, and his gyrating pelvis (captured in many, glorious, zooms to the crotch) helps fuel the burgeoning sexual independence of young women across the country. “She’s having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy,” Parker notes, as the camera surveys one wide-eyed, lip-biting fan. Costume designer Catherine Martin – Luhrmann’s spouse, credited also as co-production designer and producer – dresses Elvis in an array of soft, dreamy pinks to sublime effect.

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To say that Elvis isn’t really so much about the real Elvis might sound like it’s taking the pressure off of Butler’s performance. But that’d be an entirely unfair judgement of what’s being achieved here – an impersonation of one of the most impersonated people on the planet, that’s at times uncanny without ever coming across as parody. Sure, Butler has the looks, the voice, the stance and the wiggle nailed down, but what’s truly impressive is that indescribable, undistillable essence of Elvis-ness – magnetic and gentle and fierce, all at the same time.

It’s almost odd to watch a performance so all-consuming that Hanks – the Tom Hanks – feels like an accessory. He’s all but buried underneath layers of prosthetics and a pantomime Dutch accent, seemingly cast only so that the warm smirk of America’s dad can trip a few people into questioning whether he’s really the villain of all this. Butler makes a compelling argument for the power of Elvis, at a time when the musician’s arguably lost a little of his cultural cachet. So does Luhrmann. So does the soundtrack, which is packed with contemporary artists (Doja Cat’s “Vegas” has sound of the summer written all over it). And while not everyone will be convinced by their efforts – I know that I’m ready for Elvis to be cool again.

‘Elvis’ is released in cinemas on 24 June

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Elvis (2022) Review

24 Jun 2022

Elvis (2022)

It’s been close to a decade since Baz Luhrmann ’s last movie. Any question that time may have mellowed him is answered within the first few minutes of Elvis ; even by Luhrmann’s usual standards, the first act of this biopic is frantic with filmmaking acrobatics. Rat-a-tat editing. Dream sequences. Animated sequences. Loop-di-loop camera moves. Incongruous modern soundtrack. He immediately puts his foot down and goes racing through the life of Elvis Presley. It’s one hell of a ride, but sometimes it’s moving too fast for his audience to get more than a passing look at his characters.

Luhrmann’s ambitions are laudably grand. He follows Presley’s ( Austin Butler ) life from his teens, when he’s discovered playing alongside tired country music acts, to his final days as a bloated drug addict, so exhausted he can’t even hold his own microphone. That’s not where Luhrmann stops. He also tells the story of Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), Presley’s manager, who is depicted as a scheming villain who never misses an opportunity for a buck and puts money before Presley’s happiness. And further aims to show how America changed during Presley’s career, from the ’50s to the ’70s, especially for Black people, who Presley both supports and exploits, casually pinching influences from Black artists. Trying to squeeze in so much, even over a 159-minute running time, it’s not surprising that much of it feels rushed.

Luhrmann’s ‘more is not nearly enough’ style is at its most effective when he’s dealing in broad, simple emotions. In Moulin Rouge! or Romeo + Juliet , tales of desperate love at first sight, his explosive rhythms and romantic excess amplify all the primal yearning. It’s when he has to pause to contemplate subtler feelings that his confidence seems to desert him. His Great Gatsby was a dud because he showed little care for anyone’s interior lives. He was just there for the party. Elvis is no dud, but it again exposes Luhrmann’s disinterest in digging below the surface.

Presley’s story is told on a soap-operatic scale, towering highs or miserable lows, and little between. The relationship between Parker and Presley feels underexplored, with the otherwise smart Presley just in dumb thrall to a man clearly manipulating him. In scenes about Presley taking songs from the mouths of Black artists, Luhrmann doesn’t give a single Black character a significant voice, a surely unintended irony.

Austin Butler is sensational as Presley. He convinces at every age, from teen to 42.

Where Luhrmann absolutely excels, making some of the best work of his career, is in showing the addictive but destructive romance between Presley and his live audience. The performance sequences are a triumph. In Presley’s first live show we see how lust spreads through the crowd like a virus, girls screaming back at him in a way he doesn’t quite understand but loves. Both become hooked. As the film, and Presley’s career, go on, the audience grows into an insatiable animal, devouring more and more of Presley’s energy as he itches for another hit of adoration, prepared to surrender everything for it. There’s a manic, sexy, almost dangerous vigour to these scenes, which tell us more about Presley’s inner self than the rest of the film.

Austin Butler is sensational as Presley. It’s a huge ask for an actor to disappear into a man so well known that everyone and his uncle does a bad impression of him. Butler convinces at every age, from teen to 42. He’s not a particularly close visual match for Presley but he’s mastered vocal inflections and imperceptible details in Presley’s moves on stage that mean he captures his presence. More importantly, he gives a sense of a person, with normal insecurities, beneath the public image. Even if Luhrmann shies away from finding out who that normal person is, Butler suggests he’s there. Hanks’ Parker is written cartoonishly and he plays it appropriately. It’s not realistic but it’s entertaining.

Nobody comes to a Luhrmann film hoping for something under the top. His Elvis has all the dazzle and bombast you could ask, but it presents a portrait of an icon — not of a flesh-and-blood man.

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Elvis (2022)

• User Reviews
• The elvis songs
• Terrible pacing and editing. The first half of the movie gave me nausea it felt like everything was going at supersonic speed and the second half was much slower.
• Tom hanks was simply miscasted. Sorry but his fake dutch accent is not believable at all and its simply annoying to listen to. He should not have been in this movie. Also it felt like he was the main character and Elvis was a side character in his own movie. Tom hanks had too much screen time and his performance was quite bad.
• modern trap rap songs in a film about Elvis Presley seriously?? What is wrong with the people who made this film? I simply dont understand the choice of some of the songs.

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‘Elvis’ Is Ecstatic, Jittery, Horny, Tireless, and Tragic. Just Like the King

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

It’s been a while since I felt beaten up by a movie. Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to end that lucky streak. And with a movie about Elvis Presley , no less — hardly a subject to approach casually. Elvis , in the epic tradition of all of Luhrmann’s work, is a brash, overwhelming experience. It’s a carnival in movie form: a grand, restless, swirling contraption that’s as grotesque as any bloody-mouthed geek and as uncomfortably poignant as a sad clown. It’s too much. Yet if it were any less excessive, it wouldn’t be as doggedly effective as it often is. Elvis begins at the end — not of Presley’s life, but of the life that consumed and distorted it: Colonel Thomas Parker, his longtime manager. Played by a jowly and insistently unappealing Tom Hanks , Parker is the grandmaster of the tragic spectacle to follow. He is our narrator and admonisher, the man with the megaphone and the whip. A bedridden nobody with the movie starts, Parker can barely get this story out without being haunted by his own memories, particularly of a moment when, late in Elvis’ life, the performer is practically sleepwalking from exhaustion, and Parker says, “ The only thing that matters is that that man gets up on that stage tonight .” There he is: the King (played by a sensational Austin Butler) sprawled on the ground, barely alive and being pumped with fluids so that he can be trotted out on stage like a reanimated corpse. 

It’s no wonder Parker’s narration of this story, which frames the entire movie, bears the gutless stench of a deathbed confession. Parker tells us that the death of Elvis was in large part the fault of the public’s love and adoration, its unceasing need for more , to which Elvis became as addicted as he was to the barbiturates and alcohol that spelled his certain downfall. We already know better. Colonel Parker is preparing us for a story of Elvis’ rise and fall, which is in turn the story of his own rise and fall. Man, myth, and legend are collapsed into one hip-heaving, acutely talented, blue-eyed soulster whose tragedy is preordained by the fact that his story still belongs to the man who bled it dry. If you want the usual biopic bullet points, this movie’s got them. But we should know by now that the director of Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby will not give it to us in a straight line. This is, yes, the story of Elvis’ life, from impoverished and troubled birth to premature, unglamorous death. But every stop along the way is given the weight of a totalizing, world-shaking event: Before Elvis gets big , he’s already big. His wandering into a Black church and catching the spirit as a shoeless child in Tupelo, Mississippi, rings out with the audacious grandeur of an event that will change the course of history — which, in its way, it was. Elvis hits the necessary details, carves out the storied, prominent eras in Elvis’ personal and professional life: his Beale Street era, his Hollywood era, his time in the military, his courtship of and marriage to Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), his fated run at Vegas’ International Hotel, and on and on, flashing backward to his origin and forward to the long aftermath of his death, when we meet Parker again and are forced to remember just who it is that’s telling this story. When it works, it’s contagious. We largely have Austin Butler to thank for that. How Butler survived this role, with all of its ecstatic rebounds and tireless, jittery, sweat-stained feats of performance, is a mystery. Maybe the best thing you can say about Elvis is that the movie knows what it has. Luhrmann’s movie doesn’t need an Elvis impersonator. It needs an actor who can survive the movie — who can not only stand out from Luhrmann’s heavy sensationalism, but who can also convince us that beneath all the shiny surfaces and visual outbursts, there’s a person. Butler’s Elvis is a convincing performer — you believe, quite incredibly, that this is a man people couldn’t take their eyes off of — but he’s also credibly flawed, and daring. 

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He’s also tasked with oozing sex appeal, and this works, too. Elvis is an incredibly horny movie. It has to be. You aren’t getting this story right if we cannot believe that the man’s hip-shaking was worthy of his being labeled a public enemy. Luhrmann of course has to drive the point home with energetic tastelessness, dialing up the ooh’s and aah’s until they resemble outright orgasms. Butler’s job is to make that plausible: He has to meet Luhrmann blow for blow. The movie’s makeup and costuming team gives him a deft assist, caking him in sweat as thick as motor oil when he’s performing and squeezing him into criminally tight jeans meant to get the imagination going. In the end, it’s still up to Butler to do all of this and give Luhrmann’s style the soul it needs to make it all make sense. 

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Elvis is an entertaining movie about the man’s sex appeal and a pretty good movie about his life, even as it never dials things back enough for anyone to catch a breath. Luhrmann’s zigzagging, triumphantly kitschy style suits his subject. But a movie about Elvis made on this scale, even by a director like Luhrmann, whose work isn’t immediately recognizable as political, is saddled with other responsibilities. This is, after all, a story inseparable from the history and public sentiment that surrounded Presley. That includes the political efforts to ban him, but it also includes the attitudes behind those efforts — the Black styles and sounds that made even the white Elvis threatening. He’s credited with a sexual awakening among young people, it’s true, but he was also a vehicle for Black music finding its way onto white radio stations, Black movement slipping into white living rooms. 

Maybe unsurprisingly, then, Elvis puts more than a little effort into settling the matter of Elvis and race — Elvis and Black musicians, that is. It starts with that early memory of him slipping into Black spaces as a child and being caught up in the music that he would grow to love. It puts some of his most famous songs — Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” for example — back into the mouths of the Black musicians who first wrote them. It situates Elvis the man as an appreciator of that music, a joyous recipient and beneficiary, not the thief many have claimed him to be over the years. Elvis the legend, meanwhile, becomes inseparable from the music he loved. Even the movie’s engagement with the history and politics of Elvis’ moment seems to come back to this. We get news of the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK, as we must. But in that last case, what registers more urgently is Mahalia Jackson’s performance at the fallen civil rights leader’s funeral — a curious moment that starts with the funeral telecast playing in the background of Elvis and Priscilla bickering (yet again) before Mahalia’s voice catches Elvis’ attention. What arises after this is the era of Elvis getting back to his roots, in a way, juggling the need to make political statements, as his performances in defiance of obscenity laws plainly did, with his desire to play it safe and stay out of it. B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), and Mahalia Jackson (Cle Morgan) flow into and out of this movie with an ease that amounts to more than inspiration for Elvis. They’re seen performing at length, with Elvis often watching; by the time he performs the covers of Black music that would come to define his career, we’ve already been educated on the source. Even a couple of the needle-drops sprinkled throughout modernize Elvis’ tunes by way of hip hop and other styles that point back to Black music, just as, in the movie’s depiction, Elvis openly points back to that music. This doesn’t quite amount to a confrontation with the problem at hand, which isn’t only a matter of theft or inspiration, but of profit. On this subject, the movie imbues its throng of legendary Black musicians with world-weary understanding. It underestimates their anger, more invested in Elvis’ appreciation of them. Whether that’s a useful trade-off will depend on us. Elvis is in many ways, about “us” — the people out there in the crowd that the King, in his International Hotel performances, would make a point of gazing back at, turning up the house lights to give faces to the anonymous throng of superfans staring up at him in the dark. It’s another of the more effective threads in this movie — Elvis’ relationship to the masses. Luhrmann’s movies are overripe with basic scenes that seem to have been shredded and put back together by a madman with a poisoned genius for finding ecstasy in even the smallest things. Watching Elvis feels a little like being electrocuted. But as a document of the loving masses, and of the thrill of seeing Elvis perform, this is all apt. As is the central tragedy of the film. In the end, we’re back in that hospital room with Parker, hearing the full, winding arc of his choice to sell out his and Elvis’ souls. He grafted both of their fates into a contract that would render Parker into both Faust and the devil and Elvis into a dying machine, performing to his last breath with the helplessness of a man who seems to have no choice, but whose fatigue never dulled his love for giving all he had to give. It’s an exhausting movie. That probably means that it’s doing something right.

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Snazzy music biopic doesn't go deep enough; drugs, smoking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

When you find something that inspires you, it can

As depicted here, Elvis Presley was a well-meaning

The Black musicians who influenced Elvis make many

Death threats/aggressive fans. A concert riot show

Kissing. Sensual dancing. Sex is implied through i

Language includes: "goddamn," "hell," "a--hole," "

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Parents need to know that Elvis is writer-director Baz Luhrmann's visually stylish musical biopic about The King of Rock 'n' Roll. As told through the perspective of Elvis' longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), it spends a lot of time on Presley's (Austin Butler) launch into superstardom, the…

Positive Messages

When you find something that inspires you, it can change your life. Be careful about who you trust. Art and music are very powerful.

Positive Role Models

As depicted here, Elvis Presley was a well-meaning person who cared very much about those he loved and didn't let racism impact who he was or who he spent time with. He's a devoted son who treats those around him with respect. But drug abuse and unrelenting expectations eventually destroy him. He cheats while in committed relationships, falls under the sway of Col. Tom Parker, and suffers from self doubt. Parker is portrayed as a selfish, manipulative puppet master who didn't really care about anything other than himself. Priscilla is shown as smart and caring.

Diverse Representations

The Black musicians who influenced Elvis make many appearances in the supporting cast -- as does their struggle to achieve mainstream notice despite having immense talent. Elvis finds his way to music through a religious experience at a Black church and is depicted as feeling most at home among the Black folks he grew up alongside. Female characters are portrayed with compassion and some nuance, but they're all primarily seen through their relationship to Elvis (mother, girlfriend, wife). Young Elvis is called "fairy" because he wears eye makeup and bright colors, but this is portrayed negatively. In early scenes, Col. Tom Parker's carnival includes some stereotypically depicted "freaks."

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Violence & Scariness

Death threats/aggressive fans. A concert riot shows chaos and police hitting individuals with batons. Elvis has several guns and shoots one while in an altered state. The assassinations of historical leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sharon Tate are referenced, and TV news footage of Robert Kennedy's murder is shown. Medical emergencies/collapses.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Kissing. Sensual dancing. Sex is implied through images of women in lingerie on a bed and shoes on the ground. Some skimpy costumes. Elvis' wiggling/gyrations during his performances upset authorities and parents because it resulted in girls (and women and some men/boys) feeling sexual urges ... and throwing underwear on stage. He's referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis." Marriage and infidelity are part of the plot.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes: "goddamn," "hell," "a--hole," "s--t," "sons of bitches," "bastard," and one "f--k." Insults include "bloodsucking old vampire" and "toad." "Fairy" used as a slur. Racist terms like "animalistic" and "voodoo devil music" are used to describe Elvis' dance moves and music, which were rooted in Black culture. "Negro" and "colored" are used.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Cadillac are seen and referenced on several occasions. Sun Records, RCA, NBC mentioned. Wonder Bread, Skippy, Saltines seen. Elvis lived lavishly and became a brand unto himself.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Pill-popping, morphine use, and needles -- as well as an enabling doctor -- are shown and discussed. It all leads to Elvis' drug dependency and is all portrayed negatively. Alcoholism is depicted through a character drinking vodka and beer; it winds up leading to her demise. Other characters also drink, and people smoke cigars, cigarettes, and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Elvis is writer-director Baz Luhrmann 's visually stylish musical biopic about The King of Rock 'n' Roll. As told through the perspective of Elvis' longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), it spends a lot of time on Presley's ( Austin Butler ) launch into superstardom, the business side of his time in the spotlight, and his Vegas residency in his later years. Much of the rest of his life is breezed through, including his marriage to Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ) and his time in Hollywood. Teens may be surprised to learn that authorities found Elvis' dance moves obscene; the movie also shows the racist attitudes of the 1950s and '60s. Vices of all kinds -- drinking, smoking, spending, gambling, and drug use -- bring different characters suffering and misfortune. Sex is suggested with shots of passionate kissing and lingerie-clad women in bed, and Priscilla walks around in a short nightie, revealing her butt cheeks. Elvis owns several guns and wields one while in an altered state; there's also a riot at a concert, some medical emergencies, mourning, and footage of historical assassinations. Language includes "goddamn," "hell," "s--t," and one instance of "f--k." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (27)
• Kids say (35)

Based on 27 parent reviews

Awful cussing ruined my idea of elvis

What's the story.

Through the perspective of Elvis Presley's longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ), ELVIS explores how a boy from Tupelo, Miss., became the most successful singer of all time. Navigating the difficulties of a rapidly changing world, former carnival worker Parker reinvents Presley ( Austin Butler ) to keep him on top, but it comes at great personal, financial, and professional cost to the musician.

Is It Any Good?

Trying to tell the life story of the biggest global superstar of all time in one sitting is challenging, if not unwise. Turning what could've been a trilogy into one film, it's almost as if writer/director Baz Luhrmann is asking, what if a whole movie was a montage? Elvis whips through major events in Presley's life, all clipped as tightly as if they were in a music video. For an artist whose ascent to success was a whirlwind, perhaps it was an artistic choice to depict it in a similar way to the audience. But then, when the party stops for Elvis, so does the action, and Luhrmann abruptly turns to traditional biopic storytelling as Elvis mounts his 1968 comeback. By that time, though, viewers' brains may be so hyperstimulated that the abrupt switch will make the rest of the movie's long running time feel unnecessarily slow.

Plus, telling the story through Parker's eyes creates a barrier to getting to know Presley. The musical powerhouse is infantilized, and the movie suggests that Parker's manipulations led to the demise of both Elvis and his beloved mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). And Priscilla Presley ( Olivia DeJonge ) is portrayed more like a minor character than as the love of Elvis' life. Here, it feels like Elvis' real marriage was his partnership with Parker. Is this how Elvis would tell his story? It's hard to say, because after 2 1/2 hours, the superstar remains enigmatic, and too much is left unexplained. Still, Butler's performance is mesmerizing, the soundtrack is electric (many of Presley's songs are mixed in with those by other historically significant musicians, and the soundtrack includes plenty of modern tunes), and the idea that Elvis' lower-body wiggling was actually illegal is hysterical. Most of the central characters develop destructive habits -- but drugs, drinking, smoking, and gambling are never made to look fun, just a portal to misery. As an Elvis biopic, Elvis lacks. But as an exciting way for teens to get a taste of how "the good ol' days" weren't as "good" as some want to remember, it's ideal.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about prejudice. How does Elvis make the case that the objections to Presley's dance moves were based in racism? How does the movie suggest that White musicians' role in the advent of rock 'n' roll was cultural appropriation?

Do you agree with Col. Tom Parker's statement: "It doesn't matter if you do 10 stupid things, as long as you do one right"?

Is substance use glamorized ? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

How accurate do you think the film is to the actual events of Presley's life? Why might filmmakers choose to alter the facts in movies based on true stories?

How does this movie compare to other biopics you've seen? Do you like the mix of modern music with Presley's classics?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 13, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : August 9, 2022
• Cast : Austin Butler , Tom Hanks , Olivia DeJonge
• Director : Baz Luhrmann
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Brothers
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History , Music and Sing-Along
• Run time : 159 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking
• Awards : BAFTA - BAFTA Winner , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

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Elvis Is Utterly Disorienting. That’s the Point.

Baz Luhrmann’s chaotic, maximalist approach works for one reason: The story of Elvis Presley should be a mess.

Baz Luhrmann is a filmmaker who picks subjects as extravagant as the genre allows. When he made a teen romance, it was William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet . His musical Moulin Rouge was scored with love songs from nearly every pop era. For a literary adaptation, he went with the totemic, supposedly unadaptable The Great Gatsby . He’s an Australian director who made a movie about Australia and literally called it Australia . So when Luhrmann decided to make a biopic about a musician, he unsurprisingly alighted on a rock-and-roll singer of some notoriety: Elvis Presley.

The connection between subject and filmmaker is abundantly clear. Presley was a beacon of ostentation the likes of which may never be eclipsed. He earned his fame through pure showmanship and then swathed himself in many, many layers of luxurious ridiculousness over the years. Luhrmann has, for three decades, made maximalist movie experiences where even the quietest dialogue sequences glitter and are edited with MTV-music-video intensity. The director, who never met a humble ballad he couldn’t adorn, is thus a perfect fit for Presley’s story, which began with the simplicity of his early singles but ended in rhinestone-studded profligacy.

Elvis , the resulting biography starring Austin Butler in the title role, is quite a messy experience. It sometimes functions as a full-blown musical; other times, it forgets to demonstrate its protagonist’s colossal onstage talent. The script is bound to the familiar beats of Presley’s life, even as Luhrmann’s flashy direction tries to eclipse the staid formula of the music biopic, the rise-and-fall narrative that’s so well known, it was mocked by the devastating 2007 satire Walk Hard . Luhrmann’s approach works for one reason: Elvis should be a mess. Presley’s adult life was chaotic, and it unfolded almost entirely in public, from his spectacular successes to his ignominious decline. Watching it play out on film ought to feel a little disorienting.

That’s my best explanation for why I thoroughly enjoyed Elvis , despite some storytelling bloat and final-act aimlessness. The film is fueled by Luhrmann’s hyperactive style, of which I count myself a fan, even though I realize how polarizing it can be. Had the director decided to tell the tale of some introverted, somber singer-songwriter—think Ian Curtis or Nick Drake—his approach might feel garish, but Presley’s life (and death) were the stuff of National Enquirer legend. Luhrmann understands how to splash that melodrama across the big screen in the boldest colors.

Elvis is narrated by Colonel Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks), Presley’s dictatorial manager, who is painted as a villain squeezing money out of the star while keeping his career choices uninspiring and safe. Hanks’s performance as Parker reminded me most of the heavily made-up goons he played in Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ gonzo epic, Cloud Atlas . He’s buried under pounds of latex, sports a swollen nose, and delivers his lines in a heavy Dutch accent, alluding to his hidden past as a carnival worker from the Netherlands. To Luhrmann, Parker is the twisted showman behind the Elvis myth, helping him vault to stardom through some clever promotion but then trapping him in a series of gilded cages to keep him under control. Hanks leans into that malevolence with cartoonish relish; this is the furthest thing from the “America’s Dad” material the actor provided in other biopics, like Sully or Bridge of Spies .

The counterweight to Hanks’s overblown Goldmember homage is Austin Butler, a journeyman actor who is extraordinarily charismatic as Elvis, tapping into the singer’s showstopping persona and bravely contributing his own vocals to the movie. From the minute Elvis saunters onstage as a relative unknown in the film’s opening sequence, Butler is transfixing, brimming with gaudy confidence but also coming across as a genuine innocent. Elvis is completely baffled when the girls in the audience start screaming at what his bandmate dubs his “wiggle” (the way his hips shake when he sings), but he quickly leans into it, and Luhrmann presents the ensuing chain reaction of hysteria with all his fizzy, over-the-top panache.

Presley was so energetic as a singer that his producer had to place mics around the entire studio to capture his recording of “Heartbreak Hotel,” because Presley was given to jumping around while he sang. That’s what Luhrmann tries to do in Elvis , hopping from Presley’s local hype to major-label stardom, from his movie career to his military service, sprinkling in his marriage to Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge); the death of his beloved mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson); and his relationships with the African American musicians, such as B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who inspired his career. Even at 159 minutes, the film can’t possibly cram every detail in, so instead Luhrmann just mixes in his favorite ingredients from the Elvis cocktail.

Read: The man who invented Elvis

The film’s most traditional aspect is its three-act structure, organized by the three major performances the singer gave—his 1953 introduction as a scandalous rookie singing the songs of Black musicians, his 1968 comeback on a groundbreaking TV special, and the absurd spectacle of the Vegas residency that marked the final years before his death in 1977. Through Luhrmann’s lens, Elvis transforms from someone striking and fresh to a relic clinging for relevancy in a changing world. Luhrmann presents the familiar narrative with enough verve to make it feel new, successfully balancing Elvis’s inherent specialness with what rendered him, in his untimely end, a glamorous fossil, waiting to have his talents unearthed again and again by future generations.

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Elvis (2022) Movie Review – Elvis may have left the building, but Baz Luhrmann brings him back for the ultimate encore performance

Elvis may have left the building, but Baz Luhrmann brings him back for the ultimate encore performance

Like The King himself, Elvis (2022) is a dazzling, daring, delightfully over the top slice of rock’n’roll history. But like Elvis, the blistering source material is ultimately mismanaged and overstays its welcome with a flabby denouement that – almost – overshadows its early brilliance.

Quintessentially Baz Luhrmann- more Moulin Rouge than straight rock biopic a la Bohemian Rhapsody – the almost three-hour long film takes audiences on a greatest hits tour through the life of Elvis Aaron Presley, whose humble upbringing in a poor, mostly black neighbourhood sowed the seeds of music superstardom.

Though an undoubted talent in his own right, Presley was famed for appropriating the Black music and culture he experienced growing up on Memphis’s Beale Street for a mainstream audience in segregation-era America- “A white boy with Black moves,” as it’s put.

For young Elvis, it was the sound and style he grew up with; the sound and style of music that made him happy. But producers saw nothing but dollar signs with each strut of leather-clad hips. And that’s where our story gets messy.

Using the performer’s signature dance move as a symbol of cultural divide and social change, entire montages are dedicated to the “Elvis the Pelvis” (a real-life nickname bestowed by outraged press of the time) phenomenon. Still somehow provocative even by today’s standards, the camera lingers on star Austin Butler’s (playing Elvis) every twitch and twist as he violently thrusts his groin towards the hordes of screaming female fans below the stage. It’s hardly subtle. But who expects subtlety from a Baz Luhrmann movie? Or for that matter, an Elvis show?

The danger with both is in the fine line between spectacular and tacky- a line which Elvis unfortunately crosses several times. In an unusual move, the film is told through the narration of Elvis’s long-time manager Colonel Tom Parker as he lies on his deathbed in a Las Vegas hospital.

Played by legendary nice guy Tom Hanks doing his best impression of a Hollywood sleazeball meets crooked carny through layers of prosthetics and a truly baffling accent, Parker is portrayed as cartoonishly evil which undercuts the story’s tension and nuance.

Literally rubbing his hands together with glee as he signs away Elvis’s future to the merchandising overlords, the character is as cliched and one dimensional as they come despite being based on a real person.

Happily, the same can’t be said for Elvis himself. Sure, Elvis is not quite a comprehensive character study (the editing is too choppy and fast-paced for real emotional depth). But a perfectly cast Austin Butler manages to capture the spirit and genuineness of Elvis Presley, the man and the showman, without straying into caricature. His Elvis has the sideburns, the gravel voice, and the trademark quiff. But he also has heart.

The film similarly steers away from late era “fat Elvis” clichés and is respectful of its subject without being overly reverent. Yes, there is a scene in which Elvis shoots his television. But thankfully Luhrmann spares us from fat-suited up, giant sandwich eating montages- or worse, a Romeo + Juliet style dramatic death scene on the toilet.

At the height of his career, Elvis Presley achieved almost superhuman levels of success and adoration. Yet at his core he still dreamed of more. And while desire to keep going- to sell more, earn more, be more, for his family and for his fans- was his personal and professional downfall (it’s hard to grow creatively when you’re barricaded inside a Las Vegas penthouse between gigs), it came from a place of joy.

This visually spectacular, inventively crafted old school Hollywood fable doesn’t know quite when to quit either. But in its own imperfect fashion, it rediscovers the joy of Elvis.

Read More: Elvis Ending Explained

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'Reinventing Elvis' reveals why Presley nearly canceled his '68 Comeback Special live set

The year was 1968. Political assassinations and racial strife were tearing at the national fabric. The last thing anyone was asking for was an Elvis Presley TV special .

And yet that NBC show – the fabled '68 Comeback Special , officially called "Singer Presents ... Elvis," after its sewing machine company sponsor – managed to lift collective spirits and revive the 33-year-old rock icon’s career.

The special was re-created in living color in “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic with Austin Butler donning the gleaming black leather suit .

A new documentary , “Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback,” (streaming now on Paramount+) explores that seminal TV moment with reflections from Steve Binder, 90, who as a 35-year-old producer befriended Elvis and battled his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. USA TODAY caught up with Binder to discuss the film's revelatory highlights:

A terrified Elvis Presley threatened to quit while the studio audience waited for him to perform

Elvis was so nervous about performing in front of an audience that he called Binder into the makeup room just before taping began to say he wouldn't go on.

“He said: ‘Steve, I have forgotten everything I’ve ever said or sang. I can’t go out there, I’ll just embarrass myself,’ ” Binder recalls. “I just told him that while I had never pushed him before on anything, he had to go out there. And I left the room. I was nervous. Only when I saw him on the monitor did I realize he was going to come out.”

That loose jam session in the '68 Comeback Special was a happy accident

Binder had already organized a number of set pieces when he overheard Elvis and his entourage jamming every night in his dressing room.

“I told the Colonel 'You have to let me get cameras in there,' and he said, ‘Over my dead body,’ ” says Binder, who pestered Parker until he agreed to an onstage re-creation of the jam session. "He was sure we weren’t going to use any of it. But it turned into the heart and soul of the show.”

Elvis' black leather suit was inspired by Marlon Brando in 'The Wild One'

Binder says Elvis was obsessed with Marlon Brando and his star turn as a motorcycle gang member in 1953's “The Wild One,” complete with a black leather jacket.

“Elvis had a picture taken of himself sitting on a Harley-Davidson, imitating the Brando picture,” Binder says. “I told our costume designer that I wanted Elvis to have a leather outfit, but it couldn’t be anything you could ever buy in a store. It became his signature look.”

Did Priscilla Presley attend the taping of the '68 Comeback Special?

Elvis, wife Priscilla and their newborn, Lisa Marie Presley, moved into a Beverly Hills rental while taping the special, Binder says. But Elvis asked if he could stay in his large dressing room at NBC Studios. The singer would spend most nights there, Binder says, joking and playing music.

"The only time Priscilla came to NBC was when we did that pre-planned live orchestra medley of Elvis’s old hits," Binder says. "Other than that, we never saw her. I didn’t even know she was there until I saw it on tape, she was up in the bleachers."

Did Colonel Tom Parker leave Holland after being implicated in a murder?

In a striking moment from the documentary, Elvis expert and author Alanna Nash (“The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley”) says Parker’s abrupt and mysterious departure from his native Holland happened around the same time a woman in his neighborhood was bludgeoned to death .

Once in the U.S., he changed his name from Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and never applied for citizenship.

“There is no firm proof that he killed a woman in Holland, but he was privately implicated in a 1929 murder there, and as someone who has studied that intently over a long period of time, I do believe he had some involvement with that, though perhaps only as an accident during a robbery,” Nash tells USA TODAY. “He left Holland very quickly in that very window of 1929, and I know that he had a file in the Central Police Archives in the Hague in the '80s.”

Nash, who says she met with Parker three times before he died, has reviewed stacks of his correspondence over the years. “Something dark and deeply regrettable happened in Holland that he couldn't fix or set right. And he could fix anything," she says. "The upshot is that whatever it was, Elvis also paid the price.”

Presley on many occasions expressed interest in performing for European and Asian fans, but Parker never agreed to a tour outside the U.S.

Binder says he was shocked by the allegation but would not comment further. “The Colonel was capable of anything," Binder says. "I saw rich and powerful TV executives who were terrified of him.”

No one recognized Elvis Presley when he strolled out on Sunset Boulevard

In the documentary, Binder says Elvis asked him what he thought of his career, and Binder replied that it was "in the toilet." Later, Binder told Elvis that if they walked onto Sunset Boulevard, no one would recognize him. And, he says, nobody did.

"There was no PR that Elvis was in Los Angeles − there were so many characters with long sideburns and sunglasses, no one knew it was Elvis," he says with a laugh. "Now, had they known it was the real deal, they would have reacted big time. ... After that, he seemed to trust me more."

Did Steve Binder and Elvis Presley remain friends after the ’68 Comeback Special?

Binder’s fondness for his time with Elvis is evidenced by a framed photo of the two that hangs in his office, next to a poster for the iconic “T.A.M.I. Show” he also produced. But after five months of intense bonding, they never spoke again.

“When we were finished, Elvis gave me his phone number but I never could get through,” Binder says. “I was persona non grata with the Colonel,” who had wanted more control over the special.

When was the last time Steve Binder saw Elvis Presley?

Binder made a few trips to Las Vegas to see the singer perform during his residency, an outgrowth of the spark ignited by the '68 special. He hoped to reconnect, and once again he was rebuffed.

“The first time I went, it was amazing, and I went backstage to congratulate him, but I was turned away,” Binder says. “Then about a year later, I went again, but he was at that point turned away from the audience, engaging less. It was over.”

Fact checking the 'Elvis' movie: Did he really fire Colonel Tom Parker onstage in Las Vegas?

When Will They Speak Again? Once Close, Biden and Pelosi Are at Odds.

President Biden is upset that Representative Nancy Pelosi worked to get him out of the race. She is losing sleep over it.

President Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi embracing at an event. In July, Ms. Pelosi began pushing for Mr. Biden to exit the presidential race, and the two have not spoken since. Credit... Tom Brenner for The New York Times

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By Annie Karni

Reporting from Washington

• Aug. 14, 2024

When Joseph R. Biden Jr. visited San Francisco as a freshly minted senator and single father in the early 1970s, it was a well-known local fund-raiser and stay-at-home mother of five, Nancy Pelosi, who lent him her Jeep Wrangler to get around town.

Over the next five decades, the two old-school Catholic Democrats who grew up in the era of Elvis Presley and were inspired by the election of the country’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, cultivated a natural friendship.

They discovered that they both carried rosaries in their pockets. They learned how to wield power in Washington as leaders of top-tier congressional committees: the House Intelligence and Appropriations Committees for her, the Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees for him.

In May, at the twilights of their long careers, Mr. Biden, 81, awarded Ms. Pelosi, 84, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, anointing her the “greatest speaker of the House of Representatives in history.”

That was then. In July, Ms. Pelosi began pushing for Mr. Biden to exit the presidential race, and the two have not spoken since he made the difficult decision to step aside. There are multiple reports that Mr. Biden is angry with her. (On Wednesday, a person close to him said he was “unhappy” with the way things went.)

Ms. Pelosi has been making the rounds on a book tour, which has given her the opportunity to disparage Mr. Biden’s political team for failing, she has said, to put in place a winning presidential campaign.

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Music and concerts | from weezer tribute band to real-life smash mouth, singer zach goode rocks on, the former singer in san diego's ghoulspoon and the weezer parody band geezer now performs chart-topping hits across the nation with smash mouth.

For Zach Goode, the multiple answers began with a move to Los Angeles in 2012. It was the start of a decadelong slog that included going nowhere with the aptly named band Secret Seven, recording a little-heard solo EP, doing voice-over work for Taco Bell and Dr. Pepper commercials, playing private corporate gigs with a yacht-rock group called Windbreakers. Plus, nailing songs by The Beatles — note-for-note — as a key member in the multimedia production “Abbey Road: A Musical Documentary.”

“Then COVID happened in 2020, and everything stopped,” said Goode, who replaced original Smash Mouth singer Steve Harwell in March 2022, 18 months before Harwell’s death.

Homebound and with all his jobs dried up, Goode began recording and posting online his versions of songs by some of his favorite artists. They included Elvis Costello, Sam Cooke, Nick Lowe, Tom Petty, The Kinks, Chris Cornell The Beatles and fellow former San Diegan Tom Waits.

“I did that for 100 days straight and included an online tip jar for my local food bank,” said Goode, who performs Saturday with Smash Mouth at the SoCal Taco Fest at San Diego’s Waterfront Park. “It kept me busy and I was able to have new content to put on my YouTube page.

“When I saw an ad (in 2021) that Smash Mouth was looking for a new singer after Steve had retired, I wrote to them, included links to my (cover) videos, and said: ‘Have you seen this, and this, and this?’ I didn’t think they’d respond, but they did pretty quickly. They dug it and invited me to audition. They said: ‘This is great, can you record a video singing (the 1997 Smash Mouth hit) ‘Walkin’ On The Sun’?”

Goode did, and the band’s members liked what they saw and heard. They asked him to record another Smash Mouth song. He happily complied. Although he is a tenor and Harwell was a baritone, he demonstrated the skills to deliver winning versions of such Smash Mouth hits as “All Star” and the Neil Diamond-penned “I’m a Believer,” both of which were featured in the soundtrack to the animated film hit “Shrek” in 2001.

“We started to talk on the phone and they told me about what the gig is and why Steve left the band (for health reasons),” Goode, 54, said. “They told me they didn’t want a bunch of (short-lived replacement) singers; they wanted to do this one time only. And they also asked could I do the Smash Mouth gig having a day job and young kids. It’s worked out great because Smash Mouth almost always only travels on weekends for gigs.”

There were no under-the-radar warmup gigs for him with Smash Mouth. Goode’s debut with the band in May 2022 was at Mexico’s Corona Capital festival in front an audience of between 40,000 and 50,000.

“It was kind of like the Coachella of Guadalajara!” he said, speaking from his Los Angeles home. “The lineup included Kings of Leon, The Strokes and Blondie. It went great. I was stone-cold sober, I was well rehearsed, I was ready.

“Paul (De Lisle, Smash Mouth’s bassist and co-founder) asked me: ‘Are you nervous?’ I was like: ‘No, I’m not. This is what we do.’ The crowd was super-enthusiastic and accepting. It was an incredible show.”

New York, Kona, San Diego

Goode moved to San Diego from Hawaii after hitting a series of musical dead ends in Kona. A New York native who grew up in an arts-oriented community on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he was a devoted theater kid who enthusiastically sang in musicals and appeared in his first off-Broadway play when he was 12.

Goode spent some of his summers studying at upstate New York’s Stagedoor Manor, whose other past students include Natalie Portman, Robert Downey Jr. and Mandy Moore. He also attended St. Ann’s Performing Arts School in Brooklyn, where Jennifer Connelly was his sixth-grade classmate.

“That was a year or so before she got cast in ‘Labyrinth’ with David Bowie,” Goode recalled. “Until I was 15 or 16, I was almost all-Beatles and all-Broadway. Then, I caught the rock ‘n’ roll bug. I’d already gone through my Beatles and Cat Stevens’ phases.

“Then, I got into Devo, new wave and punk — The Clash, Elvis Costello, The Police. When I was 15 or 16, I discovered classic rock, grew my hair long and got into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. There was a Cape Cod band in Provincetown called 40 Thieves. Half the time they didn’t have a lead singer, so I’d get up and sing Zeppelin and The Doors with them.”

Goode was still only 16 when he started his own cover band, The Reach, and began doing three-set-a-night club gigs. The Reach teamed him with older, more experienced musicians. Its repertoire included favorites by such artists as Aerosmith, Stevie Ray Vaughan and ZZ Top.

“I was doing both the band and school plays,” Goode recalled. “No other feeling is more invigorating, terrifying and edifying than being ready and prepared to go on stage to do a theatrical performance, and stepping out on stage from behind the curtain when it goes up.

“Once you’ve done that, screaming in a rock band is easy!”

Goode qualified for a National Merit Scholarship, but never applied to any colleges.

“I wanted to be a rock star,” he said. “My dad had moved to Kona to start a coffee farm, so I tried starting a band there with these metal dudes. I was into bands like the Pixies and Fishbone, and the other guys were all into Metallica and Anthrax.”

In 1990, the other members of the metal band Goode was in moved from Kona to Tacoma to start over with a new singer. About a year later, they kicked out the singer and invited Goode to move to Tacoma and assume lead vocal duties.

But before he could get there, the band decided to relocate to San Diego and he joined them here instead. Renamed Ghoulspoon — “We all liked monster movies,” Goode noted — the group mixed metal, rap, punk, grunge, ska, reggae and more. Its first San Diego performance was at the Casbah and the band went on to appear alongside such rising young homegrown artists as blink-182, P.O.D. and Unwritten Law.

Ghoulspoon also played Southern California shows with No Doubt, Sublime, The Cult, 311, System of a Down and others. The five-man group released three albums, worked relentlessly and won the 2001 San Diego Music Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Band.

in 2002, Ghoulspoon changed its name to Divided By Zero and soldiered on for several more years. But Goode and his four band mates never hit it big, albeit not for a lack of effort.

“We always had day jobs, which was one of the main things that limited our success,” he said. “We had bills to pay; I sold ads and worked as a medical courier driving around with blood samples and, sometimes, body parts. Because none of us in the band were from San Diego, we didn’t have family here for a support system. All the other bands we played with that went on to the next level had managers, agents or record labels. We never had any of that.”

Weezer, meet Geezer

Goode was also a member of Geezer, which was launched here in 2005 by musical parody specialist Adam Gimbel with the goal of reimagining the Los Angeles band Weezer as a group of senior citizens. Gimbel brought Goode in around 2008 to be the new bassist in Geezer. Neither was daunted that Goode had never played the instrument before.

Geezer earned the attention of Weezer when the San Diego band opened a concert for Weezer at SDSU’s Cox (now Viejas) Arena. Goode’s then-wife, Marissa, who was dressed as a “hot nurse,” also earned Weezer’s attention.

“Playing with Geezer is some of the most fun I’ve ever had on stage,” Goode said. “It taught me so much about improv and how to fly by the seat of my pants on stage.”

A job opportunity in Los Angeles led Goode and Marissa to move to Culver City in 2012. Ten years later, he made his debut with Smash Mouth and has rarely looked back since.

“Doing shows with Smash Mouth is super fun and joyous,” Goode said. “Before I joined, I thought of Smash Mouth as a big-hits radio band. Their songwriting is amazing and has a lot of depth and ’60s influences I really enjoy. We usually play to about 10,000 people at each show and the audiences are so enthusiastic it’s crazy.”

Smash Mouth has upcoming performances in Chile, Malaysia and Australia, although most of the band’s concert dates are in the U.S.

“Nearly every show is on a weekend and usually involves three days of travel to go there, perform and fly back,” Goode said. “That gives me weekdays to be in L.A. with my sons, who are 8 and 10.”

The veteran singer laughed heartily about his four-decade career trajectory and recent rise from anonymity to the national spotlight.

“I joined Smash Mouth almost exactly 32 years after I moved to San Diego,” Goode said. “I’m incredibly fortunate how things worked out.”

SoCal Taco Fest, with Vanilla Ice, Smash Mouth, Los Amigos Invisbles, and more

When: Noon to 10 p.m. Saturday

Where: Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Highway, San Diego

Tickets: $56.94-$188.88

Online: socaltacofest.com

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