Ready for his close-up

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a biopic released in 2022, was something I felt I could do without. What turned up during the research process, however, was something else: a cache of film shot in Las Vegas and elsewhere soon after Presley’s comeback in 1969. Hitherto unseen, it consisted of unedited footage devoted not just to recording his performances but to rehearsal and backstage scenes. Here was Luhrmann’s goldmine, and he spent a couple of years turning it into EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a 97-minute documentary which I saw at the BFI’s IMAX cinema in London this week.

There are things about the film that I’m not so fond of, such as the flash-cut montages that race through various aspects of Elvis’s life amd career: the looks, the screen kisses, and so on. It’s a way of bringing younger audiences up to speed, I suppose, and the 60-images-in-60-seconds approach probably seems perfectly normal to them. I found it a bit trashy — but of course there was something a bit trashy about Elvis, as there is about Luhrmann’s work. Neither of them, one imagines, would be averse to a ride in a gold Cadillac.

More seriously, the film is stuffed with passages that succeed in telling us more about Elvis than we already knew. Where Luhrman’s approach works, against all odds, is in eliding several performances of a single song, from rehearsal to Vegas showroom, creating a single unit of music containing several perspectives. Sounds a bit meretricious? Works beautifully on songs like “Burnin’ Love” (where we appear to be shown the first band rehearsal of Dennis Linde’s composition), Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and the majestic “How Great Thou Art” (although it does suggest that Elvis’s gospel chops have deteriorated since he made his first gospel album, His Hand in Mine, in 1960).

But to see him working with his rhythm section and singers is to understand how much he loved music. You can’t sing Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” the way he does without real commitment to the material. Or the quite fantastic medley of “Little Sister” and “Get Back”. You hate medleys? Try this one, which brings the best out of the guitarist James Burton and the drummer Ronnie Tutt — making me all the more angry that the closing credits don’t list any of the members of the rhythm section or the backing singers, all of whom are clearly having a ball working with the King. I’d heard that medley before, but to see it performed, with such skill and enthusiasm, is something special.

A couple of moments caught me cold. One is when the director isolates Elvis murmuring “All my trials… soon be over,” from the traditional song Mickey Newbury incorporated into his “American Trilogy”. Another is a snatch of Presley singing as if to himself: “I feel my light come shining / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.” He repeats it, and then, as an aside, says the name “Dylan”. I felt I’d heard it before, and I had: it’s taken from a week of all- night sessions with his band in 1971, released in 2021 on a four-CD set called Back in Nashville.

It makes you wish he’d recorded it properly, and then it makes you think about all the great songs he should have recorded, in the best possible circumstances. Instead, as he admits in contemporaneous interview footage, he wasted the ’60s making terrible Hollywood movies at the insistence of his manager, Colonel Parker, who lurks around the fringes of this documentary in a way that tells you very clearly what Luhrmann thinks of him. Elvis also expresses regret and puzzlement at not having appeared in places like Europe and Japan — anywhere outside the USA, in fact — and we know who was to blame for that.

One or two other things: the shots of the various audiences are fascinating, particularly one wide-angle view from the back of the stage at the Las Vegas International showroom. And there’s a glimpse of Elvis in a car with the Memphis Mafia, giving you a hint of their special kind of camaraderie.

In all of this footage, which I guess is from 1970-71, Elvis is in good shape — a little fuller in the face, but not in the figure. He’s lithe and agile. In good spirits, too: always ready for a goofy laugh, or to change a lyric during rehearsals to include something mildly filthy. I know that such a documentary is the director’s construct, telling the story he wants you to know. But I really did come out of it feeling warmer about Elvis the human being, and even more regretful about the opportunities he missed.