EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert - Elvis Has Left the Gift Shop, Enjoy the Show
By Thom Ernst
Rating: A
Not many filmmakers get a second crack at the same myth in the same cultural moment. Baz Luhrmann does, because Baz Luhrmann has never met a legend he didn’t think could use another coat of glitter and a louder sound system.
His 2022 biopic Elvis took a narrow, feverish slice of Presley’s life—energetic, visually giddy, and oddly boxed in by the very mythology it was trying to crack open. Whatever Austin Butler brought to the title role was inevitably filtered through Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker, whose carnival-barker presence often felt like the film’s dominant personality. The story of Elvis, paradoxically, was sometimes overridden by the story being told about him.
Three years later, Luhrmann circles back with EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a documentary that leans hard into the concert-film format. EPiC finds Luhrmann finally in sync with his subject.
This is spectacle in service of performance, not performance smothered by spectacle. The colours are still loud, the editing still breathless, but this time the excess has a pulse. It moves. It sweats. It lives.
Full disclosure: I am not a card-carrying Elvis guy. Some of my resistance comes from how thoroughly the man’s legacy has been turned into cultural kitsch—ceramic busts, Graceland pilgrimages, conspiracy-theory resurrections, and an army of impersonators who look like they wandered out of a Vegas gift shop. The Elvis I grew up with was less a musician than a punchline in a rhinestone jumpsuit.
What EPiC does is skip the gift shop and go backstage. Yes, the film plunges us into the Vegas years—the era most responsible for the myth hardening into caricature—but what emerges is not the bloated parody version of Elvis. What we see instead is a working musician: a man in love with the music, visibly engaged with the craft.
There’s genuine pleasure in the rehearsal moments, in the way Elvis works the band, shapes arrangements, rides a groove until it locks in. This is not a man sleepwalking through a greatest-hits revue. This is a performer who still seems surprised—and a little delighted—that the machinery of music-making can lift a room when everyone is tuned to the same frequency.
There’s one moment that captures this better than any talking-head testimonial could. Elvis zeroes in on a single voice in the chorus—a young woman who likely thought her musical high point was being invited to blend into the background—and pulls her into focus. He compliments her voice, teases out her presence, and for a brief, electric moment, she’s not just another singer in the lineup; the King himself is seeing her.
Her joy is unguarded. His flattery feels sincere. It’s not just a gift to her, but to everyone in the room—a small, human exchange that cuts through all the pageantry and reminds you what live performance can do when it’s rooted in generosity rather than ego.
Much of this material, it’s worth noting, is drawn from footage that’s never been seen before, which gives EPiC the feeling of discovery rather than excavation. This isn’t a repackaging of well-worn images so much as a reopening of a time capsule, one that lets us watch moments unfold rather than simply recognize them.
For anyone who only knows Elvis as cultural shorthand, EPiC offers a figure far more in control of his artistry than the caricature allows. The jumpsuits and spectacle remain, but they no longer feel like costume drama. They feel like part of a working performance language. The showmanship is real, but so is the musicianship underneath it.
And then there’s the music, which sneaks up on you. Songs that decades of radio play have flattened into wallpaper suddenly regain their voltage when matched with the physicality of performance. Familiar lyrics land with new weight. Choruses rise not as nostalgia triggers but as shared, living events.
There are moments where the music, the movement, and the crowd’s collective breath align in a way that feels—against my own better critical instincts—almost ethereal. Not mystical in any religious sense, but in that rare, secular way live performance sometimes achieves: a room briefly lifted out of itself.
Seen on IMAX, EPIC comes as close as anyone is likely to get to the legend now. Closer, frankly, than most people ever did even in person. Unless you were lucky enough to catch one of Presley’s silk scarves mid-flight, this film offers an intimacy that no arena seat ever could.
The scale is overwhelming, yes, but the proximity is startling. You don’t just witness the performance; you feel folded into it.
Luhrmann is not, and will never be, a subtle filmmaker. Subtlety has never been his brand. But here, his maximalism finally has a worthy target. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert doesn’t ask you to worship Elvis so much as to remember what it felt like when the man took control of a room and decided—joyfully, deliberately—to make it move with him.
It’s not a resurrection of the legend, exactly. More like a reminder that before the souvenirs and the mythology, there was a performer who loved the act of performance itself—and knew how to make that love contagious.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is directed by Baz Luhrmann and stars Elvis Presley. It opens in selected theatres Friday, February 20.