I'm pretty sure I'm mangling a famous line from John Ford's western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when I say, "When you have to choose between history and legend, print the legend."
But that's what jumped into my head while I was watching Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, an everything but the kitchen sink biography of the King of Rock and Roll himself.
Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's film Elvis. Photo: Warner Bros.
There's nothing in here that will surprise anyone with even a passing interest in Presley's life, except perhaps Luhrmann's attention-seeking tendency to drop in anachronisms and animation, but the beats - both story and music - are well-known.
Presley grows up dirt-poor in Tupelo, Mississippi and then Memphis, Tennessee. His twin, Jesse, dies at birth and his mother pours all the love and ambition destined for the two of them into young Elvis.
Obsessed with the twin musical forces of black rhythm and blues and the transcendence of the tent gospel singers he could hear in the neighbourhood as well as country music through the powerful new medium of radio, Presley merged them all into the one great driving force of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century, rock and roll.
Overcoming his natural shyness, Presley eventually cut a record with the producer Sam Phillips and made it onto the Louisiana Hayride radio show where a carnival showman - or "snowman" as he preferred - named Tom Parker saw the effect that he had on the younger members of the audience and decided that he had discovered his lifetime meal ticket. Parker was already a music manager - the well-known country crooner Hank Snow was his headliner at the time - but he could see that this kid Presley was the future, even if he didn't really understand how or why.
The film follows Parker and Presley (played with gusto by young Austin Butler) through the various chapters of the singer's life: the death of his mother from heartbreak and alcohol when Elvis gets drafted; mooning over the teenage Priscilla while on leave from the Army in Germany, the '68 Comeback Special following years of diminishing movie returns, trapped in the gilded cage of Las Vegas instead of touring international stadiums like McCartney and Zeppelin.
Presley was an unsophisticated man but not an uncomplicated one, yet the film is unable to put its finger on any of that complication. Presley's great love and affection for black music is on show but it's taken as read, never questioned or explained, despite it being so rare in a poor white boy of the time.
So, apart from Luhrmann's distinctive aesthetic - which is like being pursued by a steamroller down a blind alley - what is the point of this exercise?
Well, my theory is that it lies partly in the choice to use Col. Tom Parker as the film's framing device - the least reliable narrator that could have been chosen.
Tom Hanks plays Parker, in a fat suit and with a false nose. He's not unrecognisably Hanks - he's just too Hanksian for that. It's a physical transformation but not a protean one. This Parker has Hanks' glint in his eye and his charm, so what would have taken Hanks to the Gold Coast to play the villain in this picture - and to become the first big celebrity Covid victim in the process.
This film is as much a tribute to Parker as it is a condemnation of the damage he did. The existence of this film is simply a new chapter in the family business - bringing the King of Rock n Roll to a new generation (aligning him with some modern stars in order to do so) and this business is the one that Parker invented, it's the thing that he built.
So, of course, Parker is at the centre of it all, even though you can't believe a word he says. It's deliciously meta and I think that's why Hanks himself is on board and having such a good time.
And despite his prodigious stylistic fingerprints, Luhrmann is just a hired gun here, working for Elvis Presley Enterprises who are the ones calling all the shots.
They are the ones that will have said, "Print the legend."
