12/3/2023 0 Comments Austin butler elvis presley biopic![]() And when a young musician informs Elvis’s future manager Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks) that this hot young talent happens to be white, the old carnival barker’s facial expression becomes greased with greed. Naturally, the film makes the well-worn observation that Presley’s genius lay in his blending of musical styles from both sides of America’s racial divide, creating a secret formula for the next… well, seven decades and counting. But the quirkier arrangements serve a purpose, since they allow Luhrmann to create an illusion of newness: a way of emulating how it must have felt for these immortal songs to fall on fresh ears. Suspicious Minds is both faithful and achingly tragic, with those repeated references to being “caught in a trap” – sung from the Vegas stage to which he’ll be contractually chained for years – wrung out for maximum ironic effect. Such liberties are bound to irk purists – and Luhrmann knows which numbers he simply can’t touch. When the 19-year-old Elvis plays the Louisiana Hayride in 1954, his guitar crunches and yowls like The White Stripes when he performs Viva Las Vegas during his Hollywood period, it’s mixed like a Britney Spears track. Even its treatment of Presley’s own songs makes a virtue of pop’s novelty. But in that signature Luhrmann way, it veers in and out of fashion on a scene-by-scene basis: it’s the most impeccably styled and blaringly gaudy thing you’ll see all year, and all the more fun for it. ![]() ![]() Yes, it’s a bright and splashy jukebox epic with an irresistible central performance from Austin Butler, who until now was perhaps best known as the cult enforcer Tex in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As such, it’s no surprise that Elvis, which has been almost a decade in the making, feels on-trend completely by accident. The rock biopic was lying fallow after the mid-noughties Oscar truffling of Walk the Line, Dreamgirls and Ray, and Bohemian Rhapsody’s coming £750 million windfall was barely a rustle in the bushes. When Baz Luhrmann decided in 2013 to follow his adaptation of The Great Gatsby with an Elvis Presley biopic, the flamboyant Australian was either ahead of the curve or a good decade behind it.
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