For Fans of Elvis Presley

Before the Hollywood contracts and the Las Vegas jumpsuits, there was a teenager in Memphis cutting demos on a lunch break. The Sun Sessions recordings of 1954 to 1955 capture something that cannot be manufactured: a voice finding itself in real time, mixing country, gospel, and rhythm and blues into a sound that had no name yet. Nothing in Elvis's later catalog is rawer or more alive. Start here.

The 2022 biopic is dazzling and deliberately overwhelming, which is the point. Luhrmann treats Elvis's life the way Elvis treated a stage: everything turned up, nothing underplayed. Austin Butler's physical performance is extraordinary, and the film's real subject is the machinery of celebrity and the cost it extracts. It is the best film yet made about the Elvis phenomenon, which is different from being a biography.

Not the Sun Sessions. Not the '68 Comeback. The 1969 LP recorded at American Sound Studio in Memphis, after years of Hollywood formula records, is the moment Elvis remembered who he was. Produced by Chips Moman, the sessions yielded Suspicious Minds, In the Ghetto, and a dozen other performances that rank with anything in American soul music. It sounds like a man reclaiming his own voice.

Elvis made 31 films. Most are cheerful but disposable. King Creole (1958), directed by Michael Curtiz, is the exception: a serious New Orleans crime drama that treats him as an actor capable of real darkness. When his Army service interrupted his momentum, the studios pivoted to safer vehicles, and the dramatic career King Creole promised never arrived. The film stands as evidence of a road not taken.