There are so many great moments in the new Elvis concert film, Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. But my favorite moment comes when he’s rehearsing backstage in Vegas in 1969, wearing those magnificently ridiculous giant purple sunglasses. He is burning with enthusiasm, talking about music and laughing with the other musicians.
The Elvis energy literally radiates out of him and refutes all the clichés of the drugged-up zombie. But you can’t take your eyes off these sunglasses. It’s just a sample. No audience anywhere. So why the big purple glasses? Simply because he is Elvis.
It’s the same cocky attitude that led him to wear a pink suit to his first audition at Sun Studios in Memphis, when he was still a dirt-poor hillbilly boy from Mississippi. This is the real Elvis, and he is the star of “EPiC.” It’s a revelation of King as a pure musical force – which is usually the last thing people want to notice about him. But no American has had a longer, stranger afterlife.
A golden age for Elvis fans
“EPiC” shows why this is a golden age to be an Elvis fan. His place in pop culture has exploded in the last decade, with portraits such as Eugene Jarecki’s documentary “The King” or Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” or the memoirs of his late daughter Lisa Marie. This is the state of the Presleyverse in 2026, 70 years after this cheeky boy became the world’s most controversial superstar sensation. “EPiC” reopens all the questions that were once thought to have been answered. How is there so much life in this dead man? How does the Elvis icon continue to evolve over time? What makes it the ultimate American obsession after all these years?
While working on the 2022 biopic “Elvis,” Luhrmann and his team found 69 boxes of lost film reels containing 59 hours of previously unreleased material stored in a salt mine in Kansas. They are mostly outtakes from the concert films “Elvis: The Way It Is” and “Elvis on Tour”. But Peter Jackson’s team in New Zealand treated the material like “Get Back” and brought it back to life as Elvis blazed on stage in 1969.
There is no commentary and no talking heads – the only narrator is Elvis himself, from previously unreleased audio recordings of one of these rehearsals. He tells his story with a painful candor that surprises. “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 in transition
Elvis is always changing, always moving, being demonized or rediscovered. In the ’50s he was despised by elite taste guardians like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen and Bob Hope, who called him “the Tennessee Twitcher.” Frank Sinatra condemned his music as a “foul-smelling aphrodisiac.” In the seventies he was ridiculed as a Vegas veteran in a jumpsuit, and in the eighties as a cultural colonizer.
It symbolizes everything about America in its extremes. Fame, corruption, sin, sex, drugs, rags to riches, decline, death. The allegations against Elvis are constantly changing, but they are a central part of his unique vitality. The worst thing that could happen to his legacy would be if he stopped provoking or irritating people. It’s bizarre that almost 50 years after his death he’s still a guaranteed topic of conversation. Maybe that’s the most American thing about him.
That’s why everyone wants a piece of him today. When Elvis died, his manager Colonel Tom Parker vowed, “I’ll keep managing him,” and that seems to be the world’s attitude. After his death, Elvis became more famous than ever, arguably the most popular dead person in the world. He lives on in a whirlpool of mystery and myth: the rockabilly fifties, the drunken seventies, the Jungle Room, the postage stamps, the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. It was always easy to lose him in the image. “The image is one thing, and the person is something else,” he says openly in “EPiC”. “It’s very hard to live up to an image – let’s put it that way.”
Music as a legacy
Not long ago, Elvis seemed to be fading as a cultural icon. He wasn’t as controversial or compelling as he once was. Ten years ago, when I interviewed Greil Marcus, the critic behind such definitive studies as “Mystery Train” and “Dead Elvis,” he spoke about Elvis’ decline as a public figure. But that has definitely changed.
“It’s not surprising how Elvis came back,” he said in 2025 when we revisited the topic. “The Elvis story continues to mutate, especially as more and more filmmakers tell it in their own way. Not just with Baz Luhrmann’s film, which I think is a great film – maybe not as great as his version of The Great Gatsby. But also with the flood of documentaries in the last decade.”
“EPiC” documents the most enigmatic and inexplicable thing about Elvis: his music. The art he created has long been overshadowed by his myth. But here she is the focus. The film focuses on the artist in 1969, at 34, upon his return to the stage. “I just missed it,” he says. “I missed being close to an audience, a live audience. So as soon as I got out of the film contracts, I went back to doing live concerts.”
An alternative vision of the future
His dream in 1969 was a world tour. “There are a lot of 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 outside the country except in the military.” But that never happened because he was under the control of Colonel Tom Parker, a prisoner in his gilded cage in Vegas. The Elvis we see here is so full of life – he shows an alternative future that he deserves.
“EPiC” doesn’t make you sad that it all ended so soon – it makes you marvel again at how bizarre and overwhelming it was that Elvis even existed.
