I’ve written before about how Elvis Presley and barbecue have never let me down. In a year that felt like it was being written by someone who’d never read a happy ending, those two things remained stubbornly, gloriously reliable. So when my birthday rolled around this year, Honey Doodle — who has been known to occasionally read my columns and take notes — decided to give me both in a single evening.
She is, without question, the greatest human being I have ever met. (She also reads this column, so the timing of that compliment is entirely coincidental.)
She took me to see EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert, the new film built from recently recovered concert footage, and then she took me to barbecue afterward. If you’re keeping score at home, that is a perfect birthday. That is a ten out of ten. That is the kind of evening that makes a man feel like maybe the universe hasn’t entirely given up on him.
Now, I need to talk about this movie. Because if you have any affection for Elvis Presley at all — or even a passing curiosity — you need to see it.
EPIC is not a biopic. It is not a dramatization. It is not Austin Butler doing his level best while someone applies increasingly alarming prosthetics. It is Elvis. In concert. On a massive screen. With recently recovered footage spliced together with Elvis speaking in his own words, in his own voice, about his own life.
And what it shows you is a man you may not have met before.
Most Elvis films — and the recent Baz Luhrmann movie, for all its sequined spectacle, is no exception — spend considerable time on the Colonel, the women, the pills, the slow unraveling of a man who was simultaneously the most famous person on the planet and profoundly, achingly alone. Those things are real. EPIC doesn’t pretend otherwise. But it handles them the way a good friend handles a hard truth — quietly, with context, in a way that says if you know, you know.
What EPIC gives you instead — what it lingers on, what it lets breathe — is the other Elvis. The one who would perform two concerts in a single day and then, instead of collapsing into whatever oblivion awaited him, would gather his band and sing gospel music until three in the morning just to come down from the high of performing. In his own words, he said he found old gospel songs comforting. Despite the sparkle of his stardom, when the stage was bare and the audience was gone, Elvis took comfort in the faith of his childhood and in music.
That detail hit me somewhere in the chest and stayed there.
The film shows rather than tells, which is a rarer gift than it sounds. You don’t need a narrator to explain that Elvis felt more comfortable on stage than anywhere else on earth. You can see it. You can watch the transformation happen in real time — a man who seemed to carry the weight of his own fame like a physical burden suddenly becoming something else entirely the moment the music started. Lighter. Freer. More himself.
It also lets Elvis speak, in his own words, about the things that haunted him. His desire to tour abroad — something he desperately wanted and could never do because of the complicated, controlling arrangement with Colonel Tom Parker. His loneliness after his divorce from Priscilla. His relationship with his audience, which was less like a performer and his fans and more like a man who genuinely needed the room full of people as much as they needed him.
The movie pairs his words with his songs in a way that is, frankly, devastating in the best possible sense. You hear him talk about loneliness and then you watch him sing, and suddenly you understand something about the music you didn’t understand before.
I’ve always preferred the later Elvis — the one who’d been through the divorce, gained some weight, and could take any song ever written and make it sound like he’d composed it himself at four in the morning after a long cry. EPIC is largely that Elvis, and it is magnificent. It shows you what made him The King — not the mythology, not the marketing, not the rhinestones — but the work. The relentless, extraordinary, two-shows-a-day work of a man who was, at his core, a performer in the truest sense of the word.
If you’ve never known much about Elvis, see this movie. If you’re a lifelong fan who has spent decades wishing you could have been in that room, see this movie. If your wife is looking for a birthday gift for a man who has everything he needs and most of what he wants, strongly suggest this movie. (Honey Doodle, if you’re reading this: you nailed it.)
And then go get barbecue afterward. Because some traditions deserve to be honored.
I sat across from Honey Doodle at the barbecue restaurant after the movie, still a little emotionally wrung out in the way that only great music can wring you out, and I thought about what I’d written before — that barbecue shows up for you when you don’t have words. That it sits there on your plate, reliable as sunrise, and quietly insists that some things in this world are still good and right.
Elvis does the same thing. He always has.
Want more of B.T. Clark’s observations? Buy the book!
