There are so many great moments in the new Elvis concert film, Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. But my favorite comes when he’s rehearsing in 1969, backstage in Vegas, wearing these awesomely ridiculous giant purple shades. He’s burning with enthusiasm, talking music, and laughing with the other musicians. The Elvis energy just glows out of him, refuting all those stereotypes of him as a doped-out zombie. But you can’t take your eyes off those sunglasses. It’s just a rehearsal — there’s no audience around — so why the big purple shades? Just because he’s Elvis.
It’s the same cocky attitude that made him wear a pink suit to his first audition at Sun Studios in Memphis, when he was just a dirt-poor Mississippi hillbilly kid. That’s the real Elvis, and he’s the star of EPiC. It’s a revelation of the King as a sheer musical force — which is usually the last thing people want to notice about him. But no American has had a longer, weirder afterlife.
Elvis circa 1970
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
EPiC shows why this is a golden age to be an Elvis fan. His place in pop culture has exploded in the past 10 years, with portraits like Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King or Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, or his late daughter Lisa Marie’s memoir. That’s the state of the Presleyverse in 2026, 70 years after this bratty kid blew up into the world’s most controversial superstar. EPiC reopens all the questions that people once used to think were settled. How is there so much life in this dead man? How does the Elvis icon always keep evolving with the times? What is it that makes him the ultimate American obsession, after all these years?
While making the 2022 biopic Elvis, Luhrmann and his team found 69 boxes of lost reels, containing 59 hours of previously unseen footage, kept in storage at a salt mine in Kansas. It’s mostly outtakes from the concert films Elvis: The Way It Is and Elvis on Tour. But Peter Jackson’s team in New Zealand gave it the Get Back treatment, restoring the footage to life, as Elvis blazes onstage in 1969. There’s no commentary or talking heads — the only narrator is Elvis, from previously unheard audio footage from one of these rehearsals. He tells his tale with a painful candor that’s a surprise to hear. “Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it,” he says, raw anger in his voice. “And I couldn’t say anything about it.”
Elvis is always changing, always in motion, getting demonized or rediscovered. In the Fifties, he was despised by elite tastemakers like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, and Bob Hope, who called him “the Tennessee Twitcher.” Frank Sinatra condemned his music as “a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.” In the Seventies, he was mocked as a Vegas has-been in a jumpsuit; in the Eighties, as a cultural colonizer. He symbolizes everything about America at its extremes: fame, corruption, sin, sex, drugs, rags-to-riches, decline-and-fall, death. The accusations aimed at Elvis are always in flux, but they’re a key part of his unique vitality. The worst thing that could ever happen to Elvis’ legacy is if he stopped offending, outraging, or confounding people. But it’s bizarre that nearly 50 years after his death, he’s still a guaranteed argument starter. That might be the most American thing about him.
That’s also why everybody wants a piece of him now. When Elvis died, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, vowed, “I’m gonna keep right on managing him,” and that’s been the world’s attitude as well. After his death, Elvis got more famous than ever, arguably the world’s favorite dead guy. He lives on in a swirl of mystery and mythology: the rockabilly Fifties, the drugged-out Seventies, the Jungle Room, the postage stamps, the fried-peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. So it’s always been easy to lose him in the image. “The image is one thing, and the human being is another,” he says candidly in EPiC. “It’s very hard to live up to an image — I’ll put it that way.”
Not so long ago, it looked like Elvis was fading as a cultural icon. He wasn’t as controversial or compelling as he used to be. Ten years ago, when I interviewed Greil Marcus, the critic who wrote definitive studies like Mystery Train and Dead Elvis, he discussed Elvis’ decline as a public figure. But that’s definitely changed. “It’s not surprising the way that Elvis came back,” he said when we revisited the topic in 2025. “The Elvis story continues to mutate, especially as more and more filmmakers come in to write the story in their own way. Not just with the Baz Luhrmann film, which I think is a great film — maybe not as great as his version of The Great Gatsby. But also the whole slew of documentaries in the last 10 years.”
There’s always been different Elvises for different eras. He turned into a new kind of cultural obsession in the Eighties, when he started to get spotted in supermarkets and shopping malls around the country, the dead King risen to life. The theory went that he faked his death, which is why he spelled his name wrong on his own tombstone. (He was “Elvis Aron Presley,” not “Aaron.”) The Nineties were madly in love with Elvis, to the point where the Naked Gun movies could get laughs by casting 1960s Broadway star Robert Goulet as Priscilla Presley’s love interest — an in-joke for fans who knew that her husband hated Goulet and would shoot out TVs at the sight of his face. The King was bigger than ever. His daughter married Michael Jackson. Bill Clinton was the first presidential Elvis impersonator, going on The Arsenio Hall Show to play “Heartbreak Hotel” on sax. (Bill’s favorite was “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” because of course it was.)
His kung fu was still strong in the early 2000s, when a Dutch techno remix of “A Little Less Conversation” became his umpteenth posthumous hit. But until lately, it was almost heretical to focus on Elvis as an artist, because it was just too easy to simplify him into a rhinestone-studded metaphor for whatever theory you might be pushing. It’s tough to imagine a movie this serious happening 10 or 15 years ago.
But EPiC documents the most mysterious and inexplicable thing about Elvis: his music. The art he made used to get so overshadowed by his myth. Case in point: Luhrmann’s appalling 2022 biopic, which totally bungled the story of his musical development, getting the “Hound Dog” story ass-backwards wrong. Yet this movie is great enough to atone. It feels so timely because it focuses on the music, still the part of his story that nobody can explain away. It doesn’t get into the drugs, barely mentions his family. It’s the portrait of the artist in 1969, at 34, finally returning to the stage. “I just missed it,” he says. “I missed the closeness of an audience, of a live audience. So just as soon as I got out of the movie contracts, I started to do live concerts again.”
There’s footage of Elvis in the 1950s, when he was the most loathed and feared figure in pop culture, a symbol of sexual liberation, racial integration, cultural mobility, a hillbilly boy trespassing where he didn’t belong. It’s startling to see the bitchy pride Elvis took in this. An interviewer asks him with contempt, “You call it singing, what you do?” The kid simply drawls, “Well, I sold 5 million records. Somebody calls it singing.” No defensiveness in his voice — just the most relaxed kind of confidence, a sexy brat with zero shame. When a more sympathetic reporter asks, “Do you think you’ve learned from the criticism?” he replies with a straight face, “No, I haven’t.”
But America took him down anyway, trapping him in the Army — as he mourns in EPiC, “I got drafted and overnight it was all gone.” (He once saluted my Uncle Don, his captain in the German tank corps.) As soon as Elvis returned, he got locked right back up in the Hollywood hamster wheel, cranking out movies at the rate of three per year. Some were pretty great despite themselves, like Blue Hawaii or my beloved Girl Happy. (Or — I swear — It Happened at the World’s Fair.) Some were downright delightful, like Viva Las Vegas, with his muse Ann-Margret. But most were garbage. He hit rock bottom with Change of Habit, a rom-com starring Mary Tyler Moore as a nun. Elvis: “Maybe there’s somebody else?” Mary: “You could say that.” It was the last act of a desperate man.
EPiC is Elvis returning to the fans, rekindling their torrid romance. In one great moment, he croons the Beatles’ “Something,” until he gets to the line “Something in the things she shows me” and quips, “Very suggestive lyrics, man!” He strolls through the room, letting fans kiss him, grope him, mess up his hair — the ladies’ hysteria is something to behold. (Best fan sign: “You Kiss Me I Quiver.”) In his high-voltage “Polk Salad Annie,” he cracks some risky jokes, changing the lyrics — “Got a little morphine, got a little hashish” — and miming a toke on a joint. He grabs his guitar for a medley of “Little Sister” and the Beatles’ “Get Back,” belts recent hits like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” or “I Shall Be Released” or the gospel hit “Oh, Happy Day.” When he needs a drink of water onstage, he announces, “Boy, I tell you, it gets dry up here, man. It’s like Bob Dylan just sat in my mouth.”
“Suspicious Minds” is a pure rock blowout, the movie’s astounding peak. He goes into a power-twitch trance, shaking in ecstasy along with the crowd, the music reverberating out of his pores, right up to the moment when he signals the band and cuts it dead. He achieves the same effect on “Burning Love,” as well as ballads like “Can’t Help Falling In Love” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” He’s the King — but a King who’s hungry to win people over. Celebrities like Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr. come to see him. The movie ends with a note that Elvis did 1,100 concerts between 1969 and 1977, sometimes three shows a day. There’s also a great poetic epitaph from Bono, who says, “Elvis made America before America made him.”
Onstage, 1972
Fotos International/Archive Photos/Getty Images
These days, America’s most high-profile fan is the current president, who is obsessed with how Elvis embodies American realness in all the ways he can’t. He keeps trying to force his way into this story. Most notoriously, he turned a 2024 campaign rally into a DJ party, standing zombie-stiff to the sound of Presley singing “An American Trilogy,” which also appears in EPiC. It was the King’s Civil War medley of “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the spiritual “All My Trials.” Marcus summed it up in Mystery Train: Elvis “signifies that his persona, and the culture he has made out of blues, Las Vegas, gospel music, Hollywood, schmaltz, Mississippi, and rock & roll, can contain any America you want to conjure up. It is rather Lincolnesque; Elvis recognizes that the Civil War has never ended, and so he will perform ‘The Union.’” But the distance between Abe and Elvis is nothing compared to the gap between Elvis and Trump.
That’s why Presley’s music speaks to the country we’re living in now. Right from the beginning, he was a radically ambitious artist, in addition to everything else he was. His first Sun single was a blues tune, Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” revamping the chords, the lyrics, the tone. Elvis added a new verse of girlish sighs, cooing “I need your loooovin’!” — which we now think of as the highlight. But for the flip side, he howled Bill Monroe’s bluegrass hit “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the Appalachian hillbilly anthem. Pairing these songs on the same single — from two of the nation’s most despised underclasses — was a revolutionary vision of America. It scandalized people before anyone even knew how he looked or moved.
He’d throw anything into his Sun sessions — like “Mystery Train,” reworking Junior Parker reworking the Carter Family, or “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” a Dean Martin hit originally written for the soundtrack of Cinderella. Only Elvis would try to inhabit the voice of a blues man and a Disney princess on the same record — but that’s because he was both at heart. His catalog is packed with highs, ripe for rediscovery, along with godawful lows even worse than you can imagine. He’s got The Sun Sessions (rockabilly psycho), Golden Records (megalomaniac stud), Elvis Is Back (blues speed freak invents the Stones), Blue Hawaii (Tennessee luau), the 1968 Comeback TV special (black-leather redemption), From Elvis in Memphis (dadcore country soul). The music isn’t a footnote to his legend — it is his legend.
His dream in 1969 was a world tour. “There’s many places I haven’t been yet,” he says in EPiC. “I’d like to go to Europe. I’d like to go to Japan and all those places. I’ve never been out of the country except in the service.” But it never happened, because he was under the thumb of Colonel Tom Parker, a prisoner in his gilded Vegas cage. The Elvis we see here is so full of life — it presents a whole alternate future he deserved to have. He turned down the 1974 remake of A Star Is Born, opposite Barbra Streisand, a movie that could have opened up a whole new future for him. (The role went to Kris Kristoffersen.) He could have toured the world — or even begun speaking his mind. One of the saddest scenes here is when a reporter asks about the Vietnam War and the draft. His eyes freeze with terror. “I can’t even say that,” Elvis babbles, as if Colonel Parker’s snipers are watching him for a wrong move.
He should have had more great records in him — he was still in his prime. His recent From Elvis in Memphis is not just one of his best, it’s something new, with soulfully husky adult love songs like “Any Day Now,” “Gentle on My Mind,” and one of his most poignant performances ever, “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road.” But with the Colonel keeping him on a tight leash, his albums dried up, with only occasional glimmers, like his hoarse 1972 “Hey Jude,” his 1971 “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” or “Hurt,” from just a year before his death. Yet EPiC doesn’t make you sorry it ended so soon — it makes you marvel, all over again, at how bizarre and astounding it was that Elvis happened at all.
