“EPiC”, the film about Elvis by Baz Luhrmann

That Elvis Presley was the greatest performer in the history of R&R is obviously a questionable statement, yet supported by this homage by Baz Luhrmann to The King: a compilation of clips from concerts, studio rehearsals, interviews, which captures Elvis at the apogee of his career, therefore after Hollywood and after his “comeback” of ’68.

EPiC – acronym for Elvis Presley in Concert – is a brilliant, at times dizzying, montage of largely unpublished materials to which Luhrmann, born in ’62, had access during the making of “Elvis” (the 2022 biopic) and with which he was able to make this definitive documentary on the “king of rock and roll” who passed away in ’77 at the age of forty-two.

Following the director’s intuitions we can appreciate the crucial moment of Elvis’ story: the one in which the choice of songs opens up in a phenomenal songbook that goes from classics to the Beatles, from blues to gospel; the arrangements gradually become more complex and refined, the stage costumes more dazzling and clownish, the performances increasingly intense and exhausting. Performances held at a frenetic pace – due to management’s greed – which will end up devouring the man and the artist.
But we are spared the sad, steep decline: here Elvis is young and handsome, and his voice is as thunderous, in all its registers – tenor, baritone, bass – as ever.

So “EPiC” is what Luhrmann was able to squeeze out of hours and hours of unreleased sequences, patiently reconstructed and remastered in the audio and restored in the video: a dizzying playlist of the best of Presley, enriched by the maximalist and at times dreamlike baroque which is the director’s true stylistic signature, with short inserts from the past (Elvis’s first performance in Hawaii was in ’57) but focused above all on Las Vegas in the early Seventies, to best represent the years in which Elvis could stand on stage with physical and singing dignity. Seeing, is believing, a breathtaking “Suspicious Mind”, with Elvis giddy and pleased, but in total control – as well as his vocal and interpretative means – of the extraordinary band.

There is also, at the end, a touching poem written and recited by Bono; in short, one hundred minutes of rhythm & blues, gospel, country, pop songs, everything that Elvis blended to return mixed and packaged by his immense talent, and which after him was called rock & roll.

Better to see it at the cinema, obviously, in Dolby Atmos, but if you expect it on TV at home the advice, obviously, is to not care about the neighbors and turn the volume up to the maximum.