The first trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic… | Little White Lies

Incoming

The first trail­er for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic fea­tures lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion, more action

17 Feb 2022

Words by Charles Bramesco

Close-up of a person wearing sunglasses, looking directly at the camera with a stern expression.
Close-up of a person wearing sunglasses, looking directly at the camera with a stern expression.
Austin But­ler por­trays the hip-swivel­ing, scan­dal-ignit­ing rock-and-roll super­star in the new film.

Despite the best efforts of the team behind Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Sto­ry, the musi­cal-genius biopic remains alive and well and wrapped in crowd-pleas­ing nar­ra­tive clichés. Every new entry to the genre must prove its worth inde­pen­dent of the oft-par­o­died build­ing blocks com­mon to all rock lumi­nar­ies, a chal­lenge now under­tak­en by the long-dor­mant Baz Luhrmann with his new film Elvis.

The first trail­er for the upcom­ing musi­cal-dra­ma appeared online just this morn­ing, and teased a more exu­ber­ant take on the famil­iar star’s‑rise arc seen not so long ago in the Elton John pic­ture Rock­et­man. But this one has a secret weapon, in the form of Tom Han­ks doing what is with­out a doubt the sin­gle goofi­est voice of his long and sto­ried career.

Austin But­ler (who you may recall get­ting the busi­ness end of a dog’s jaws as Man­son Fam­i­ly mem­ber Tex Wat­son in Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood) takes the lead as Elvis Aaron Pres­ley, the hip-swivel­ing gui­tarist that set teenage-girl loins aflame through the 50s and 60s. Han­ks backs him up as Colonel Tom Park­er, his man­ag­er for more than two decades, a wily Dutch­man whose busi­ness acu­men was in no small part respon­si­ble for Presley’s tow­er­ing success.

But the most sur­pris­ing name of the project is that of direc­tor Baz Luhrmann, who hasn’t com­plet­ed a fea­ture film since his max­i­mal­ist take on The Great Gats­by nine years ago. His take on the usu­al music-biopic tem­plate is guar­an­teed to be dif­fer­ent by sim­ple virtue of being his, evi­dent in the careen­ing cam­eras and extrav­a­gant pro­duc­tion design teased in the clip below.

Cov­er­age for the film will undoubt­ed­ly be focused on the trans­for­ma­tive phys­i­cal­i­ty of Butler’s per­for­mance, his shucks-miss voice and wag­gling legs clear­ly worked on for many, many hours to be rehashed in com­ing inter­views. Peo­ple prone to say­ing things like the Oscar race begins here” will most like­ly announce that the Oscar race has begun there. The sea­sons, they go round and round.

Elvis comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and US on 24 June.

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