Elvis

Baz Luhrman’s dynamite biopic takes the audience on the roller coaster ride of feverish excitement and devastating declines that was the life of Elvis Presely. Showing the roots of Elvis’s musical coming of age in a black gospel community, the film gives a rich insight into this one-off amalgamation of genres and influences from music, to fashion to social circles.

The sizzling hot lust Elvis induced in his audiences is captured perfectly by Austin Butler who only has to so much as shake a leg before sending young women into a state of insatiable, animalistic desire. And so begins the simultaneously addictive and destructive relationship with the public, a relationship capitalised on by Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker, played with hefty prosthetic enhancement by Tom Hanks. It is this central relationship which both makes Elvis a superstar, and initiates the beginning of his destruction. This is the blueprint story of talent exploitation that would go on to be replicated in cases such as Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, who also succumbed to external forces who seized their magic and squeezed it for every single buck available at fatalistic cost.

The film is an absolute blast, and despite knowing how the story ends before watching the film, the tragic demise is painful to watch. The bloated, mumbling mess that was Elvis at the end embodies the very notion of wasted talent, miss-managed gorgeousness and just a big crying shame. I wanted to go straight back into the cinema to watch it again - a whirlwind addition to Luhrman’s electric catalogue.