EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert review – Baz Luhrmann restores The King to his real-life Seventies glory

There is a moment in EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert when a teenager in the front row clamps her lips onto Elvis like a limpet, before she is swiftly dislodged by her mother. Elvis, unruffled, moves on to the next one. At another point, a bra is flung in his direction; he instinctively turns it into a bonnet. Just as The Beatles incited mass hysteria, so too did the King – despite never performing outside of North America.

Clearly, Baz Luhrmann is one of his devotees. Returning to the subject four years after his feverish, Oscar-nominated biopic Elvis was released in a blizzard of sequins and rhinestone-encrusted bombast, the Australian director fashions a film that is exhilarating, immersive and so immediate that the 5,000 miles (and 50 years) between the singer’s Las Vegas stage and a cinema seat in Britain cease to exist. That Luhrmann trades in razzle-dazzle certainly helps: he capitalises on his subject’s fondness for garish sunglasses, giant sideburns, and an arsenal of jumpsuits filigreed with gems and boasting outlandish collars. The two men’s shared appetite for gilded excess and perpetual motion makes this tribute, even more than the biopic, seem like a kinship of strutting peacocks.

The material itself was not easy to find. While making Elvis, Luhrmann heard rumours of footage shot for two 1970s concert films that had never been released. With some considerable effort, researchers managed to track down 59 hours of preserved film negative – all 69 boxes of it – sitting untouched for decades in Warner Bros vaults beneath the salt mines of Kansas. Peter Jackson’s restoration team – who had brought The Beatles back to life in his epic three-part documentary Get Back – worked similar magic here. Visually, it’s extraordinary: colours explode off the screen; every sequin, every bead of sweat, every streak of mascara catches the light like diamonds on velvet.

As for the shows themselves, they are electrifying, and Luhrmann, surprisingly, has the restraint to let them breathe. The Vegas residency footage catches Presley at his most hyperactive – swivelling, gyrating, goofing, draping himself across the stage, drenched in sweat, holding absolutely nothing back. Backstage between sets with Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr, or in the rehearsal studio practising Beatles numbers “Yesterday” and “Something”, he seems barely to be working at all. “Suspicious Minds” at full throttle suggests otherwise. A cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” stops you cold.

And yet. Far be it from me to expect any kind of interrogation from a director this besotted with his subject, but the question of Elvis’s public silence during the civil rights era – a silence that benefited him enormously while the Black artists whose music made him possible faced a very different America – is raised and promptly glossed over. Colonel Tom Parker is once again cast as the controlling villain, with a conveniently timed cut to “You’re the Devil in Disguise” doing the heavy editorial lifting. When Elvis is asked about Vietnam and replies, “I’m just an entertainer”, Luhrmann replays the words as if they are a tragedy rather than a choice. Not helping, either, is the fact that Priscilla Presley, whose story was told by Sofia Coppola in a 2023 film, only appears here for about half a minute.

None of this will bother the fans, though, and perhaps it shouldn’t. EPiC makes no secret of what it’s about. This is a celebration conducted by a director whose proclivity for spectacle makes him the ideal person to make it. Viva Las Vegas!

‘EPiC: Elvis in Concert’ is exclusively in IMAX from 20 Feb and in cinemas everywhere from 27 Feb