Baz Luhrmann Gives Elvis, Belatedly, the Role of His Lifetime

If you’re among the people on Earth who think that Elvis Presley is still alive, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, Baz Luhrmann’s remarkable new Elvis concert picture, will make you believe even more fervently. Luhrmann’s 2022 Elvis biopic was a lurid and often engaging look at Presley’s life. But Tom Hanks’s bizarre, baroque performance as Colonel Tom Parker took over that movie and made it about something other than what people actually love about Elvis: his music and his stage presence.

Watching EPiC, which Luhrmann has beautifully and crisply crafted, you can imagine yourself in a front-row table in Vegas, sitting alongside Sammy Davis Jr. and Cary Grant, both of whom occasionally pop into the frame. It’s like a Peter Guralnick essay made flesh. Elvis lives again.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Baz Luhrmann
Running time: 96 mins

Parker (and Priscilla Presley) do make home-movie cameo appearances in EPiC, but the movie is almost entirely Elvis concert footage or backstage and rehearsal footage from the early 1970s, accompanied by archival Elvis interviews. Luhrmann found 65 reels of Elvis concert material that MGM was storing in a Kansas salt mine to prevent moisture damage, the discovery of which he’s described as “a bit like Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

To fill out the picture, Luhrmann edits this footage — taken from six concerts in Elvis’s legendary 1970 residency at the International Hotel in Las Vegas and his 1972 U.S. tour — together with archival footage to create the most astonishing portrait of Presley’s music ever put to screen.

There’s no dark Elvis in this movie, no drugged-out Elvis, no Elvis shooting out the TV with a pistol. This is a portrait of the most singular entertainment talent America has ever seen, in fabulous technicolor. Elvis kisses 100 women on the lips and strikes poses on stage that would make the most experienced yoga practitioners envious. He wears shirts and sunglasses that would make a normal man seem ridiculous. Sweaty glamour exudes from every frame.

And the music is astonishing. There are some hits: “That’s All Right,” “Hound Dog,” and an absolutely incredible version of “Suspicious Minds” toward the end of the picture. But you also see Elvis interpreting other artists. He sings the Beatles’ “Get Back” and “Something,” and does a beautiful version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

In the film’s back third, there’s a gospel section that includes an extended riff of “How Great Thou Art” that almost had this Jewish man making a beeline toward the local megachurch. The Lord never had a more effective messenger than Elvis Presley.

You also see quite a bit of rehearsal time in EPiC, providing evidence that Elvis was a lot more than just a showman. He was also a bandleader fully in control of his orchestra. He gives his backup band and his backup singers plenty of moments to shine. And you can see their eyes almost glisten with wonder, saying, “Holy crap. I’m working with Elvis Presley.”

Luhrmann gives an extended workout to the song “Burning Love,” which seems like canon now but was in fact late-period Elvis. There’s actually footage of the first-ever live performance of the song, so fresh that Elvis is reading from the song lyrics onstage. It may not seem hard to memorize “I’m just a hunka hunka burning love,” but you try doing it while wearing a blue spangled jumpsuit.

Luhrmann devotes some screen time to Elvis’s movie career, particularly his disastrously tacky post-Army color films that made him into a punchline in the 1960s. In the voice-over, Presley laments that he wanted to be a movie star, but Hollywood kept slotting him into joke pictures. No one ever taught him how to act, or how to channel his unique charisma to the screen.

Well, EPiC does that. Elvis is playfully flirtatious, silly, melodramatic, and fun-loving. You can see the man beneath the legend and can see for yourself why the world fussed over and worshipped him. In this concert film to end all concert films, Luhrmann finally gives Elvis Presley the movie role of a lifetime: himself.