It’s a bit of received wisdom that biopics, generally, may be seen as Oscar bait: a genre of films that have been militantly designed to impress Academy voters based on how closely they resemble recent history. The track record dictates that playing a real person wins you an Oscar – as was the case for seven of the last 10 best actor winners.
The same logic may not apply for Austin Butler’s turn as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Only in the flimsiest, most surface-level sense is this a biopic – it takes profound, drastically misrepresentative liberties with the truths of Elvis’s life – and in name alone is Butler actually playing Presley. The film, and Butler’s performance, are far greater than that: he is playing Presley as he exists in the cultural imagination, the man who saved American culture and who could unite American politics, a kind of messianic figure who had to use his God-given power to rebuild a world in flux. In other words, he is essentially playing Superman – and Elvis, true to that, plays like Luhrmann’s concession to a superhero film, filled with two-faced enemies creeping in the shadows and shady lobbies looking to thwart our hero at every turn.
