Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticElvis Presley, with the exception of the Beatles, is the most mythological figure in the history of popular music.
That makes him a singularly tempting figure to build a biopic around. But it also makes telling his story a unique challenge.
Everything about Elvis (the rise, the fall, all that came in between) is so deeply etched in our imaginations that when you make a dramatic feature film out of Elvis Presley’s life, you’re not just channeling the mythology — you’re competing with it.
The challenge is: What can you bring to the table that’s headier and more awesome than the real thing?Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is a fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream — a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera.
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