Baz Luhrmann’s Radical EPiC Is the Tribute Elvis Deserves

Before there were memes, there was graffiti, and in the 1980s and ’90s you’d sometimes see the anagram “Elvis Lives” scrawled in spray paint around this or that city or town. It was a furtive declaration with an unclear meaning. Was it a reference to the popular conspiracy theory that Elvis hadn’t really died on August 16, 1977, at age 42, but was instead hiding away somewhere, living a happy, secluded life as a private citizen? Or did it mean that after his death, the molecules of energy he’d left behind had simply taken another living shape? As the critic Greil Marcus put it in his 1991 book Dead Elvis, “The enormity of his impact on culture, on millions of people, was never really clear when he was alive; it was mostly hidden. When he died, the event was a kind of explosion that went off silently, in minds and hearts; out of that explosion came many fragments, edging slowly into the light, taking shape, changing shape again and again as the years went on.” Elvis died one death, only to spring back in an infinite number of forms, as uncountable as the stars in the sky.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But sometimes, Elvis goes a little underground—he’s never fully forgotten, but his reformed molecules, jiggling away in their eternal Brownian motion, can grow a little hazy. Within the past few years, it’s Baz Luhrmann who has done the most to bring them back into focus, first with his fantastically unruly 2022 biopic Elvis, starring Austin Butler, and now with a film that’s less a documentary than a kind of spiritual conjuring. Luhrmann’s EPiC, short for Elvis Presley in Concert, is constructed of previously unreleased footage Luhrmann’s researchers found when they were looking for material the director might use in Elvis: this trove, 59 hours’ worth of performance and interview material, had been languishing in a Warner Bros. film vault located, according to the movie’s press notes, in an underground salt mine in Kansas. (Where else?) In addition, Luhrmann has sourced some rare Super 8 footage from the Graceland archives. This newfound footage, painstakingly restored, forms the fabric of EPiC, which, despite Luhrmann’s penchant for hurtling over the top—or maybe even because of it—manages to feel profoundly intimate.

EPiC mixes concert footage with interstitial clips of Elvis just being Elvis, as if to collapse, as much as will ever be possible, the distance between his public and private selves. It begins pretty much at the beginning of Elvis’ superstardom: Quizzed by an unseen interviewer, he frankly and cheerfully explains the jittery physicality of his performance style: “I can’t stand still. I’ve tried it, I can’t do it.” In one early clip he’s asked, via a filmed phone call, if he’s apologized for the way his onstage gyrations have scandalized the public. His answer has a bruised frankness: “I haven’t. Because I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong.” The answer cuts to the heart of everything that was scandalous about Elvis, which has less to do with his thrilling hyp-no-shake than with his adamance that we must all be allowed to acknowledge ourselves as joyous, sexual beings. In the 1950s, that was a radical idea for any performer.

Luhrmann hopscotches briskly through Elvis’ early career, breezing over the landscape of admittedly cheesy movies he made between 1956 and 1969 (Elvis himself didn’t like most of them) and his stint in the Army, from 1958 to 1960, during which he was stationed in Germany—his mother, Gladys, whom he adored, died during this time, instigating a kind of breakdown. We see glimpses of Elvis’ longtime manager Colonel Tom Parker, whom Luhrmann frames as an evil manipulator, though in reality, his role may not have been as diabolical as it seems. (For more on that, read Peter Guralnick’s sensibly grounded book The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World.) Luhrmann has also unearthed some hypnotic clips of Elvis performing live in Hawaii in 1957, wearing a shimmering gold jacket, his neck ringed with a lei. This was Elvis near the peak of his beauty, a time when the pleasure he took in performing seemed to bathe him in radiant light, not unlike the way medieval painters used to render the grace of the Holy Spirit as a ray of gold leaf. No wonder he got under people’s skin; what they saw and identified as profanity was really a state of grace, as natural as Adam before the fall.

We see Elvis rehearsing—and joking around—with his band, a vision in mutton-chop sideburns and an array of paisley satin shirts. (Elvis always loved a good belt, and the silver-and-turquoise numbers he sports here do not disappoint.) But the film’s core is footage from the hundreds of performances Elvis gave in Las Vegas between 1969 and 1977. His costumes alone are a wonder, a series of bell-bottom jumpsuits, many of them accented with elegant high, Revolutionary War-era collars and cinched with macramé belts, their fringe swinging in time with his hips. Elvis knew what looked good; a true sensualist, he gave in to beauty without a second thought.

In some of the Vegas footage, it’s possible to see glimpses of the desperate figure that Elvis would later become: there’s the hint of a jowl here or there, a costume that suggests a thickening waist, or, most tellingly, an instant or two where his gaze veers toward blankness. But mostly, the Elvis of EPiC is almost alarmingly alive. His moves are smooth, never creaky: he shows off his penchant for finishing a song with a karate-lunge flourish. His voice sounds burnished and vital, never tired. He devises ingenious medleys, allowing “Little Sister” to segue into a version of the Beatles’ “Get Back.” And as he sidles into the seductive randiness of “Polk Salad Annie”—it’s perhaps the raunchiest song about poverty ever written—he explains, to anyone who doesn’t know, exactly what polk greens are, plentiful plants found in Appalachia and the Southern United States that could be foraged, cooked, and eaten. He spins out a part of Annie’s story that seems to mesh with his own: those greens were all she and her family had to eat, but, he says in his comforting drawl, “they did all right.”

Luhrmann takes these words and spins them in an echo chamber, even as he superimposes a ghostly-looking picture—the famous black-and-white baby photo of Elvis nestled between his parents—atop the image of Elvis revving up to sing the song. In the picture, baby Elvis is wearing a battered but jaunty felt hat, the sunshine center of a family that also, at the beginning, had nothing. Luhrmann isolates baby Elvis, with his quizzical, knowing face, and sends him whirling toward us; he wants to make sure we know this part of Elvis’ story, and he’s telling it with this picture. Is it corny? Or is it everything? Luhrmann’s gift as a filmmaker, as well as the very thing that can sometimes make him so incredibly annoying, is that he always errs on the side of “everything.” He gives EPiC his all, and its joyous abundance almost feels like more than we deserve—just as, maybe, we never deserved Elvis. And yet there he was, giving us more, possibly, than he had to give, always knowing when to toss in a joke or a wisecrack to keep things from getting too heavy. His life was great and vast and almost unbearably sad. The life he has now is better, because he’s given it over to us. And just by continuing to look at him, and hear him, we build it anew day by day.