EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025)
Elvis Presley needs no introduction, and yet somehow every generation finds its own way back to him. He arrived in the mid-1950s as something genuinely unprecedented: a white Southern boy absorbing Black American musical traditions and transmitting them back through a physicality and charisma that television barely knew how to contain. What followed was a career of remarkable highs and, eventually, a prolonged and well-documented decline, the Hollywood years trading early wildness for polished but unremarkable musical comedies, and then the Las Vegas residency of the early 1970s, a period that reads in retrospect as both triumphant and melancholy in equal measure. The man who had once rattled Ed Sullivan's cameras was by then a glittering, rhinestone-suited fixture in a casino showroom, still capable of extraordinary performances and yet visibly fraying at the edges. It is territory that has attracted biographers, documentarians and dramatists for decades, and it shows no sign of losing its pull.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert arrives as something of a byproduct of a much larger project, though that description undersells it considerably. When Baz Luhrmann was deep in research for his 2022 biographical drama Elvis, he uncovered a collection of footage that had sat largely unseen: 16mm film from the Las Vegas residency, 8mm home movies from the Graceland archive, and audio recordings of Presley speaking candidly about his own life and career. The drama could only absorb so much of it, and so Luhrmann, working through his own production company Bazmark alongside Authentic Studios and Sony Music Vision, has shaped the remainder into a standalone concert film and portrait running just under 100 minutes. It is an unusual genesis for a documentary, though not an unwelcome one. For a companion piece on music documentaries handling legacy with similar care, see also Depeche Mode: M (2025), which I covered earlier this year and which raises comparable questions about how we frame a living archive for a contemporary audience.
The cast here is, by necessity and design, anchored by Presley himself, but the film also puts his live band in frame: guitarist James Burton, rhythm guitarist John Wilkinson, bassist Jerry Scheff and harmony vocalist Charlie Hodge, all veterans of those Las Vegas shows and the wider touring operation. Burton in particular is a presence worth watching, one of the most technically assured guitarists of his era and a figure whose contribution to those performances is sometimes overshadowed by the spectacle surrounding him. Behind the camera, editor Jonathan Redmond shapes the various strands of archive material into a coherent whole, the rhythmic interplay between performance footage and more intimate home-movie material requiring a careful hand to avoid feeling like a highlights reel. Composer Elliott Wheeler, a long-term Luhrmann collaborator whose work on the 2022 Elvis drew on both period sounds and contemporary orchestration, provides the score here, threading musical texture around the existing recordings without smothering them. The overall look of the film is necessarily dictated by its sources: the warm, slightly faded grain of 16mm and the softer, domestic quality of 8mm, a visual palette that is period-specific and often affecting in its imperfection. There is no slick modern gloss imposed over the footage, and that restraint feels like the right call. I also reviewed Luhrmann's earlier work when I wrote about Romeo + Juliet (1996), a film that showed even then how comfortable he is working with material that carries its own cultural weight.
Elvis Presley has always fascinated me. There was nobody quite like him when he first burst onto the scene, a wholly new kind of star, and the shape of his life has a strange gravity to it: the electrifying young Sun Records singer, the movie years, the army draft, and then the long, sad slide into the bloated, exhausted figure of those final Las Vegas years. Any film that promises a closer look at that man has my attention before it has even started.
This one has an unusual origin. It is built from footage that Baz Luhrmann unearthed while making his Elvis biopic, and Luhrmann, whose Romeo + Juliet remains my favourite version of that particular story, clearly could not bear to let it go to waste. Rather than fold it all into the drama, he has shaped it into a concert film and portrait in its own right, and I am glad he did.
The material itself is the draw. We get 16mm footage of his Las Vegas residency, the showman in full flight, alongside 8mm home movies from Graceland that catch him off-duty and unguarded, with a scattering of interviews threaded through it all. There is something affecting about seeing the icon and the private man set side by side like this, the performer and the person caught within the same film.
What struck me most, beyond the footage, is how well it is put together. The editing is excellent, shaping all these disparate scraps into something that flows and holds your interest rather than feeling like a loose archive dump. It is a very interesting watch, and for anyone with even a passing fascination with Elvis, as I have always had, it is time well spent. Three and a half stars, a thoughtful, well-assembled window onto one of the most singular figures popular music has ever produced.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert sits in a small and rather specific niche: the archive-driven portrait that owes its existence to another, bigger film about the same subject, and yet manages to justify itself on its own terms. For anyone drawn to questions of performance, persona and the strange loneliness that can accompany enormous fame, there is real substance here. The film does not try to be a comprehensive biography or a revisionist argument, and that modesty suits it. Luhrmann has, in effect, curated rather than invented, and the material, handled with enough editorial intelligence to breathe, rewards the attention. Some legends shrink the closer you look; others, given the right frame, only grow more interesting. Elvis, it turns out, is very much the latter.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-10-08
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025) on YouTube
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