In an effort to promote Celine Song’s blank-eyed romcom Materialists last summer, A24 listed the director’s “movie syllabus” for similar big-screen romances that would set the mood for the picture, ranging from obvious Jane Austen-inspired connections like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. to headscratchers like the Robert Altman murder mystery Gosford Park (huh?). This year, Emerald Fennell promoted her “Wuthering Heights” adaptation with a similar syllabus of inspirations compiled for the BFI’s Letterboxd account, with obvious choices like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet clashing against headscratcher inclusions like David Cronenberg’s Crash (huh?). This “movie syllabus” trend is far from the most obnoxious promotional gimmick in an age where filmmakers are pushed to chug hot sauce, take lie detector tests, and play video games to reach audiences through TikTok & YouTube; at least it’s about the movies. Still, there’s a kind of “Show your work” eagerness to the maneuver that feels pre-apologetic, asserting that the filmmakers have done their homework and know their stuff, therefore the movie they’re promoting is Legitimate Cinema. It’s the same feeling I get when biopics conclude with real-life footage of their subjects in the end credits sequence, proving that they were well cast, styled, and researched regardless of whether the final product of all that effort was any good, as the point of making movies was accuracy, not artistry.

In a way, Baz Luhrmann’s new documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a two-hour argument for his 2022 Elvis biopic‘s historical accuracy, extending the “Show your work” credits sequence bragging to feature length. Constructed entirely from the archival footage pulled for reference material while staging the Vegas residency sequence of the Elvis biopic, EPiC hammers home just how accurate Luhrmann’s team was in recreating Vegas-era Elvis’s sets & costumes. The 16mm footage from those Vegas shows, its rehearsals, and the resulting roadshow American tour is cleaned up & restored to the same vivid HD image quality as the narrative feature it inspired, to the point where you can hardly tell the difference between Austin Butler fellating his microphone vs. Elvis doing the same (except that Elvis is slightly goofier about it, and more beautiful). Like with the other “Show your work” maneuvers of its ilk, however, that doesn’t retroactively make Elvis a great movie, just because it’s proven to be a visually accurate one. It is a lot more useful to an audience than an email screenshot, a Letterboxd list, or an end-credits stinger, though, since it stands on its own as a separate work of art. As a concert film, EPiC is equally garish & scatterbrained as the last picture Luhrmann made about Elvis, but it does have a leg up on its bigger, louder predecessor in that it’s anchored by its reverence for the archive, and it isn’t frequently interrupted by Tom Hanks blathering about “snow jobs” under several pounds of prosthetics.

I don’t personally care much for Elvis Presley’s music, especially during his Vegas period, when he had strayed so far from rock-n-roll that he had become a kind of lounge-singer circus act. Luhrmann frequently draws attention to the contrast between Elvis’s 1950s rock-n-roll beginnings to his 1970s stage-musical crooning by juxtaposing early television-broadcast performances of songs like “Hound Dog” with the proggy monstrosities they had become by the time they reached Vegas. It’s a different genre of music entirely, one that prefers broad spectacle over lean aggression, which is exactly what makes Luhrmann such a great fit for the material. Even if you don’t vibe with the music of EPiC, the spectacle of its onstage pageantry is still worth a gawk. Elvis is working in James Brown mode here, conducting every guitar stab and drum fill of his backing band with the suggestive wiggling of his caped & jumpsuited body. He belts, patters, and sweats with the best of ’em, performing more as an athlete than as a musician. In the most deranged sequences, Elvis takes a break from singing to instead run laps around the concert hall, making out with untold dozens of women in the audience one at a time without concern for personal violation or illness. It’s more of a space alien encounter than it is a live concert (the kind where everyone in the audience clearly wants to fuck the alien), making him the perfect subject for a Baz Luhrmann stage show.

On a formal level, there isn’t much Luhrmann is doing here that can’t be found in other recent music docs; he’s mostly just following the modern industry standard. In sequences where Elvis’s stage show is interrupted by rehearsal footage from behind the scenes, EPiC recalls the Beyoncé concert film Homecoming. In the frantic introduction that provides context for Elvis’s pre-Vegas career before the show begins, Chris Smith’s recent DEVO doc comes to mind. The brief sequences of pure restoration recall the Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, especially in the third act, when Elvis goes Gospel. David Bowie has recently seen both extremes of that treatment, both in the restoration of his concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and in the post-modern kaleidoscope edit Moonage Daydream. I enjoyed all of those movies to varying degrees, mostly because I enjoy listening to those artists’ music, so it was obviously more of an uphill battle to get on board with a singer whose songs I don’t care about. If the two entries in the Luhrmann-Elvis project have done anything for me musically, it’s in convincing me that “Suspicious Minds” is a pretty good song, one that Luhrmann was smart to make the core theme of his Elvis thesis, both sonically and lyrically (leaning on the “caught in a trap” motif when depicting the Vegas residency as the apex of Colonel Tom Parker’s abusive mismanagement of Elvis’s career). If the project’s done anything for Elvis’s legacy, it’s in posthumously fulfilling the singer’s wish to appear in “better movies,” which he was frequently blocked from doing after returning from WWII (again, through Parker’s mismanagement). Luhrmann should be prouder of that accomplishment than the lesser feat of “showing his work” by restaging the Vegas Elvis lookbook, which is a victory usually celebrated in more by-the-numbers biopics like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody.

-Brandon Ledet