‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Dazzling Excavation Of The King’s Vegas Comeback

A work of cinematic-musical archaeology, EPiC is not, strictly speaking, an Elvis Presley concert film. It’s a compilation of performances, rehearsals, and behind-the-scenes footage from the artist’s early Las Vegas years, a run that saw him take the stage roughly 1,100 times between 1969 and 1977. Most of what appears here draws from the first phase of that residency, capturing not only Presley’s magnetic stage presence and the sheer force of his music but also the labor, discipline, and preparation that went into a long-term engagement that served, at various points, as comeback, coronation, and — eventually — something closer to a gilded cage.

The film grew out of material Baz Luhrmann assembled while researching his 2022 Elvis biopic — footage that hadn’t made it into other concert films or recordings, including the remarkable Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour. Hours of performances that had never been seen, or had only appeared in alternate versions, now surface here alongside recorded interviews with Presley himself, woven into the film as a kind of first-person narration. Add a newly remastered and re-edited soundtrack — released as a companion album — and you have what amounts to an extraordinary document.

Luhrmann opens with a brief survey of what might be considered the major chapters of Elvis’s career: his breakthrough as a defining figure of early rock and roll in the 1950s; his long detour through Hollywood, where a string of musical films gradually hollowed out his artistic credibility; and finally, his return, beginning with the landmark 1968 NBC television special and continuing into the Las Vegas residency that followed. During those first years at least, the Vegas Elvis was a revelation — intense, fully alive, armed with new material, and reinvented as an all-terrain showman rather than a straightforward rock star.

The film doesn’t linger on — though it clearly implies — the darker arc of that Vegas chapter. Largely at the hands of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, the residency eventually became something like a sentence. Presley wanted to tour internationally, to play beyond American borders, but for reasons that only came to light later, it never happened. And so the Las Vegas Elvis eventually curdled into self-parody — a character, a costume, an almost campy icon that doesn’t quite do justice to what those shows actually were between 1969 and, at minimum, 1973.

But in those early years, a Presley rejuvenated after the long grind of Hollywood musicals was nothing short of a phenomenon — helping establish Las Vegas as a destination for extended artist residencies long before that became standard practice. This is the Elvis who reconnects with his early catalog, who folds in soul and gospel, who works a crowd with the timing of a stand-up comedian, who still commands a voice of extraordinary range and leads his band with precise musical authority — and who was adding to his canon songs that would eventually rival, or surpass, his 1950s classics in cultural staying power. The film delivers live versions of «Suspicious Minds,» «You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,» «Burning Love» — a number he famously struggled with early on — «Always on My Mind,» and «In the Ghetto,» alongside rehearsal footage and covers ranging from the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel to country and soul standards.

What emerges, taken as a whole, is a portrait of an artist in active pursuit of his audience — working to win them back, or simply to hold them: a volatile mix of screaming fans angling for a kiss, celebrities, tourists, and devotees from every era of his career. The film, while quietly making the case against Parker for stunting Presley’s artistic growth, stops well short of digging into his personal demons. It’s a portrait of Elvis as a man who owned every stage he ever stood on: charismatic, gifted, capable of sweating off three pounds a night while giving everything he had, and of embodying what might fairly be called a unified theory of American music — blues, soul, country, folk, R&B, rock, gospel, and that ineffable quality known as showmanship. The man had all of it, and it lived in him at a cellular level. Near the end, as he walks off stage and disappears into the wings — drenched, spent, but visibly happy — and steps into an elevator, the film quietly closes the book on one of the great stories in the history of popular music.