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Elvis Presley doesn’t need a biopic. But if anyone is going to give one to him I don’t mind that it’s Baz Luhrmann making the attempt. It’s a pretty apt pair-up. Not because the Australian filmmaker has a good track record with that historically difficult-to-master genre — Elvis is actually his first-ever foray — but because the sensibility he’s cultivated since his debut, 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, accords with the popular image of the King so naturally that it’s a little surprising it’s taken him six movies in 30 years to get here. 

From Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) to The Great Gatsby (2013), Luhrmann can be relied on to make expensive-looking movies that are nothing without their garish, hyperactive images and dramatic storylines so besotted with their own grandeur that all emotion comes across primary-colored, highest-decibeled, and broadest-stroked. He holds firm on the old-fashioned belief that movies, before doing anything else, should offer an aesthetic escape we couldn’t find anywhere besides on a theater screen — for better and for worse. Who better than Luhrmann, then, to chronicle the famous-to-the-point-of-being-mythic rise-and-fall story of a man whose very image is inextricable from excess, and whose artistry is in large part remembered for its ostentatiousness? 

Read the full column on 425.