Baz Luhrmann's "tone poem" documentary summons the singer's majesty but fails to dig any deeper
Once you've let Elvis Presley into your life, the King never truly leaves the building. Baz Luhrmann's 2022 jukebox musical biopic Elvis did a sensational job of introducing the star's genius to a new generation - and now the director's back for more. This is partly thanks to the Elvis fandom, whose fervour for the King remains undimmed.
During the biopic's pre-production, Luhrmann excavated MGM archives, located in salt mines in Kansas City, to rescue 59 hours of mythical 'lost' reels of Elvis in his '70s pomp, including concert footage and previously unseen outtakes from the documentaries Elvis: That's the Way It Is and Elvis On Tour.
When this material didn't make its way into Elvis, fans hounded Luhrmann to release it. The revelatory footage had no sound - and so began the painstaking process of syncing up existing audio. Luhrmann also hit the motherlode: an unheard 45-minute audio recording of Presley interviewed about his life.
The resulting EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a kaleidoscopic mix of documentary and concert movie, replete with a behind-the-scenes peek at the rehearsal process, much of it narrated by Elvis himself. Forget talking heads: Luhrmann has described his tribute as a "tone poem".
Peter Jackson's Park Road Post Production company, which augmented The Lord Of The Rings director's Beatles marathon Get Back, helped to restore the footage with the same hyper-real hue. For a good half of its runtime, this 96-minute Elvis homage is similarly successful. An opening salvo of archive material sets the scene for Presley's explosive early career in the '50s, before he ran aground with mediocre movies in the following decade.
It's to Luhrmann's credit that these well-covered narrative touchstones feel so fresh: a montage of Hollywood career lows, including a scene with a bloke in a budget dog costume in 1968's Love A Little, Live A Little, is genuinely disorienting. Imagine how Elvis must have felt. Inevitably, though, the film really comes into its own when the King returns to the stage.
As he vamps through 'Burning Love', delivers a haunting 'In The Ghetto', throws shapes and goofs around, you won't be able to take your eyes off the greatest showman of the 20th century. EPiC is, however, less successful when Luhrmann attempts to address nuanced matters such as Elvis' divorce from Priscilla Presley and his partnership with controversial manager Colonel Tom Parker.
Clips of the former are accompanied by Elvis crooning 'You Were Always On My Mind', the latter by '(You're The) Devil in Disguise'. Yet these relationships are too complex for such breezy treatment - it took author Peter Guralnick some 600 pages of his 2025 book The Colonel And The King to argue that Parker may not have been a villain after all.
Baz Luhrmann is a famously superficial filmmaker - when it comes to the flash and glamour of The Great Gatsby and, indeed, Elvis, this is his great strength. Documentary, though, which requires deeper insight than he summons with EPiC, is not his natural habitat. Still, he's certainly captured the King's iconoclasm, for which we can only say: "Thank you, thank you very much."
