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The scene where the young Elvis (Austin Butler) writhes on a small-town bandstand singing that he’s evil, evil, evil is the best depiction of how racial injustice warps American moral categories since Huck Finn said well then he’d go to Hell.

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All these rock’n’roll movies always make their heroes make a choice, the choice is always the wrong one (if it were the right one, we wouldn’t know their names), and in this movie Elvis’s choice is between the Black world that helped form him, and the white world that pays him. I’m going to write a bit about that, because I want to think about why it worked for me. Everything’s forbidden and everything’s for sale.Īnd–oh, I didn’t expect this, nobody asked Luhrmann to do this and I’m so glad he did–and the undercurrent of evil at the midnight carnival is mostly about racism. Elvis‘s Elvis is a microcosm of his country, of course, and Elvis‘s America is a tent revival on a carnival midway. And its subject matter is ecstasy too: all the ways we package and sell ecstasy. It swirls and sprawls and then punctuates with precise cuts.

This movie’s style is a wrack of ecstasies. It opens not with the hits, “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Blue Suede Shoes,” and not with the influences–you’ll get them later, don’t worry, Big Mama Thornton will strut between the barstools belting “Hound Dog” because Baz Luhrmann always gives the people what we want, but the opening number is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” This collision of Christ and violence, beauty and wrath, this sales pitch (notice how she never says, “We shall kill to make them free”?) and reminder that America is two countries, still–it’s the perfect choice. The first half of Elvis is unbearably good.

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