‘Elvis:’ All Shook Up Over Austin Butler’s Star-Making Performance

I was just over two years old when Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, and yet, I have an incredibly vivid memory of that day.

I was sitting in the front seat (pre-car seat days, of course) of my father’s car. He had taken me to Greenville, North Carolina, for some reason that I do not remember. When the announcement came over the radio, my father stared sadly out of the car window and said with what I know presume to be his trademark mixture of sincerity and sarcasm, “Sing a song for Jesus, Elvis.”

Even then at just two years old, I felt the weight of the moment. I understood that some shift in popular culture had happened. I rarely saw my father react to such things with anything approaching a sense of melancholy, but there it was.

That memory came flooding back to me as I watched Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis, his kaleidoscopic take on the cultural icon’s meteoric rise through to his heartbreaking final days. If you’re like me, then your reaction to the film will rise and fall with the beats of Elvis’s life. Lurhmann’s hypnotic, addictive style of smashing together iconic imagery with rapid-fire editing and a pulsing, beating soundtrack is as close to cinematic adrenaline that you’ll ever see. When it’s gone, you feel empty, longing for that fix that feels so good and so right. But overall, Elvis is an ingenious and somehow very fresh take on Elvis’s life. It’s nothing we haven’t heard or seen before, but thanks to Austin Butler’s transformative performance, you leave the theater feeling you’ve seen the real man reincarnated.

Lurhmann’s film ties the Elvis (“EP”) legacy with that of “Colonel” Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), Elvis’s long-time manager. Parker narrates the film, but he’s very much an unreliable narrator. He declares his innocence in all things related to Elvis’s early death, yet his actions through the film tell a different story. Parker’s addiction to gambling and need to milk his cash cow heavily contributed, so says the film, to Elvis’s seemingly irreversible decline.

We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much, baby
Why can’t you see
What you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a word I say?

Those lyrics take on an entirely new and sinister meaning throughout the film.

Hanks’s Parker isn’t the monster or the oddity you assumed he would be thanks to the trailer. His performance falls perfectly in line with what Lurhmann sets out to do with the character. He’s a con artist, a “snowman” whose goal in life is to make cash fall from the sky like snow. At times, even Elvis can’t believe he’s being fooled by Parker/Hanks’s charismatic performance. The audience, I suspect, will feel the same.

But the true stars of the film are Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler. Both seem to be pulling career-best work from the other. Luhrmann understandably makes Butler the soul and center of the film, filming Butler from nearly every angle faithfully recreating all of Elvis’s more eccentric movements. This film isn’t quite the obsessive madness that was Moulin Rouge, his very best film, but it comes close. I especially loved an early sequence that meshes Elvis’s first major performance with a backstory involving his first experience with a Black tent revival. Throughout the film, Luhrmann reminds the audience that Elvis and Black culture were inseparable, and you understand that Elvis got away with opening white culture to the Black sound because he was a white man. One thing the film doesn’t do, which I suspect will cause some ire, is comment on or dutifully explore Elvis’s appropriation of the Black sound. It’s obviously there and not shied away from, but the film never makes apologies or amends for it.

Austin Butler’s performance, though, is the reason to see the film. He somehow captures Elvis’s magnetism and charisma with every shake and pelvic gyration. He knows how to make an audience love him with that trademark Elvis Presley sneer. He doesn’t just play Elvis. He becomes him in every sense of the word. Butler’s performance is one of the best representations of an iconic superstar that I’ve ever seen. Even in the darker, more dramatic moments of the film, Butler seems to directly channel Elvis and understand him intimately.

If the film has a flaw, then it’s the middle section that drags slightly. It remains entertaining, of course, but it’s missing that visual adrenaline that Luhrmann laid down earlier in the film. Those scenes are the drug, and we need them when they’re gone. Fortunately, Luhrmann returns to that style for the Vegas-set final act when we, the audience, become inadvertently complicit in Elvis’s downfall. We’re supposed to appreciate the tortured social justice warrior he wants to be. But what we really want is the gyrating megastar, the adrenaline-inducing performances, and the giving-away-your-soul dedication that ultimately killed Elvis Presley.

Elvis opens nationally today.