On July 31, 1969, Elvis Presley took to the stage of the International Hotel in Vegas for the first time, still riding the high of his electric 1968 TV special, which had revived his flagging career.
What was originally conceived of as a four-week residency at the hotel – a brand new, $60 million development, then the biggest in the world – would spin out into a seven-year stint, bracketing off the final chapter of Presley's tragically curtailed career, the theatre a witness to his descent into a state of narcotised, rhinestone-encrusted stupor.
But it had started off so well: the huge theatre and a blue-sky production budget had inspired Elvis to put together a show that achieved new heights of kitschy extravagance.
It's surely this Vegas-era Elvis – the jumpsuit-clad crooner, caped and spangled and accompanied by backup singers, a band, and a 40-strong orchestra – that called out to to Baz Luhrmann, himself an incorrigible showman with a bowerbird's eye for things that glitter and shine, and particularly those that are liable to break.
Taken collectively, his films advance a thesis that the greatest heartbreak is reserved for the most beautiful people – and who was more beautiful than the strange, pompadoured boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, with a voice like melting butter and those impossibly lascivious hips?
With Elvis, Luhrmann – whose last film took as its source material one of the signature works of American literature (The Great Gatsby, from 2016), and the film before that, the mythos of this entire nation (Australia, 2012) – gives the old bazzle-dazzle to what is perhaps his most iconic subject yet.
For the story of Elvis Presley is no less than the story of rock 'n' roll, from the backwater shacks and steamy late night clubs of the American south to prime-time national television.
And Luhrmann bravely takes it all in his kaleidoscopic sweep: with its often-hyperactive camerawork, the film plays as a 159-minute musical roller-coaster ride through Elvis's 42 years. You're liable to get all shook up, if not from tenderness of feeling then possibly from motion sickness.
Stepping into the King's blue suede shoes (well, two-tone) is Austin Butler, a blue-eyed Californian whose previous credits are mostly limited to teeny-bopper TV. A relative unknown, he's able to disappear into the role in a way that a bigger player (like Michael Shannon, playing a paranoid, lonely King in 2016's Elvis & Nixon, for instance) couldn't – if not to the same degree as the enigmatic Michael St. Gerard, whose uncanny resemblance to Presley saw him cast in the role several times in the late 80s and early 90s.
Much like Kurt Russell, the one-time Disney teen idol who bagged the lead in John Carpenter's 1979 made-for-TV movie Elvis, Butler gives a performance that should grant him entrée to the pantheon of hot young silver screen stars, as the sweet, soulful centre of this Wonka-esque confection.
And it's only fitting that Elvis maketh the star and not the other way around. Even if his name doesn't hold the charge it once did, it's still undeniable that he exerted an influence that would be unimaginable in today's atomised pop-cultural landscape. There can be no bigger name on the poster than "Elvis".
Less camouflaged, despite being packed in prosthetics, is Tom Hanks, hamming it up in a rare villainous role: the shady former carnie who went by the name Colonel Tom Parker is, as he crows in his voice over narration, "the man who gave the world Elvis Presley".
He might just be the man who killed him, too – not directly, but via the escalating demands he would place on his client, and then by way of ensuring his access to the pharmacopoeia that, for a time at least, would make it possible for Elvis to fulfil those demands.
Back in his sideshow days, before he moved into managing musical talent, the Colonel (as he tells us) specialised in the kind of attractions that elicited feelings the punters "weren't sure they should enjoy". The squeals that issue involuntarily from all the girls when the young Elvis shakes his hips on stage – "Well, that's alright, mama," he drawls – tell Tom Parker that this kid has an act he can do something with; here was "the greatest carnival attraction" he'd ever seen.
The story unfolds – in a prismatic fashion, zipping giddily back and forward in time – nominally from the Colonel's perspective: his wheedling narration is a bid for absolution, though scene after scene works to condemn him.
The film's sidelong look at its subject evokes Citizen Kane, perhaps cinema's definitive depiction of the process by which wild success transmutes into loneliness and narcissism. Like Kane, whose dying utterance of "rosebud" baffled even those who were once closest to him, Butler's Elvis – Luhrmann's Elvis – ultimately remains elusive; a larger-than-life figure able to be known only through so many layers of mediation – through his gold sunglasses and the camera lens.
"This ain't a nostalgia show," Butler's Elvis tells the musicians assembled on the International stage during rehearsal, and they launch into a beefed-up, flourish-laden version of That's All Right, the Arthur Crudup song that had been his debut single 16 years prior. (Crudup appears in the film played by Gary Clark Jr., his sultry blues an illicit thrill for the adolescent Elvis, played by Chaydon Jay.)
No one will be surprised to hear that Luhrmann's Elvis isn't a nostalgia show either – after all, the film is stamped with the golden insignia of the man who dressed Romeo in an aloha shirt and had a fin de siècle French courtesan sing Elton John.
The musical anachronism that felt egregious in The Great Gatsby, a story that is on some level about taste, plays better here – and I say this as someone who felt a pang of dread on seeing the words "Edge of Reality (Tame Impala Remix)" on the soundtrack listing.
It works in part because there's a discernible logic to the more outré numbers: Doja Cat's Vegas, woven into a scene of Black nightlife on Memphis' Beale Street, gives Hound Dog back to Big Mama Thornton, the first artist to record the track (played on-screen by Shonka Dukureh); Eminem's The King and I, though confined to the credits, draws a line between two white artists raised in a Black milieu, who drew on a Black idiom.
But it's also because Elvis himself, once just a boy with "greasy hair" and "girly make-up" who dreamed of buying a hot pink Cadillac, always defied good taste. In his landmark 1968 TV special, he sandwiched a musical number set in a brothel between a gospel medley and a "kung fu spectacular". The King didn't discriminate – and it's precisely for that reason that he would come to define rock 'n' roll.
Luhrmann is no Elvis Presley, but you gotta love a spirited impersonation.
Elvis is in cinemas from June 23.
