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In this telling, their fateful encounter occurs in 1955 at the Louisiana Hayride, where a youthful Elvis initially appears to be shaking from nerves more than anything else. Once on stage, though, he leaves his inhibitions behind, inspiring ecstasy both in the largely female crowd and in Parker watching from the wings.
The other love story: Austin Butler as Elvis and Olivia de Jonge as Priscilla.Credit:Courtesy of Warner Bros
“He was my destiny,” Parker tells us. A sometime carnival barker and eternal hustler, the Colonel may not know much about music but he understands showbusiness – especially the “biz” side of the equation, or what a character in Sweet Smell of Success called “the theology of making a fast buck”.
The implication is planted that rock ’n’ roll is just one more sideshow act, if not an outright con game. Yet these suspicions cast almost no shadow on the film’s Elvis, whose public swagger gives way offstage to a childlike helplessness: repeatedly we see him striving to spread his wings as an artist, only to find destiny, in the form of the Colonel, holding him back.
As for the lead performance, it’s fair to say that almost anyone would look low-key compared to whatever Hanks is doing. Butler, who does some of his own singing, is no slouch as a mimic but stronger on aw-shucks charm than insolence: this is an Elvis who smiles more than he sneers, and nearly always appears to be awaiting someone’s approval.
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Underlying all this is the weirdness of seeing a very American story enacted by a largely Australian cast, including Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham and Kodi Smit-McPhee (aside from the leads, the key exceptions are actors playing African-American characters, such as Kelvin Harrison jnr as B.B. King).
Clearly, authentic casting wasn’t a top priority. But then, the idea that authenticity and phoniness are two sides of the same coin may be part of what Baz, the people’s postmodernist, has been trying to tell us all along.
That would be one way to interpret the perverse insistence on having Elvis share the spotlight with his shifty mentor, from the moment they lock eyes in a literal hall of mirrors to the Star Wars-style climax where the Colonel explains that deep down they’re the same: “Two odd, lonely children reaching for eternity.”
“Reaching”, certainly, is the word.