Priscilla is the big screen takedown of Elvis that he’s had coming for decades

Sofia Coppola’s new film has no truck with the musical genius of the King of Rock’n’Roll, writes Louis Chilton. Instead, it gives voice to the woman who suffered his demons and shines the spotlight on the truly nasty side of Elvis – brutish, predatory, and deeply insincere

The King and I: Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny in ‘Priscilla' (Sabrina Lantos)

If you come at the king, you’d better not miss. It’s common wisdom – Machiavelli by way of The Wire’s Omar Little. And yet coming at the king is exactly what Sofia Coppola’s new biopic Priscilla attempts. Not just any old monarch, but The King, Elvis Presley himself, played in the film with oily disregard by Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi. Elvis isn’t the focus of the film, which instead fixes its perspective to the young Priscilla Beaulieu, whom the singer woos, gaslights, mistreats and eventually marries, having met her as a 14-year-old.

In the film, Priscilla is portrayed – blisteringly well – by Bad Times at the El Royale’s Cailee Spaeny. We meet her as a schoolgirl and doe-eyed ingénue, who encounters an already famous Elvis when he was 24. Silent scenes of classroom tedium are juxtaposed with Presley’s gold-dipped courtship; once she moves out to Graceland to be with him, the fairytale romance dissolves into stagnant, moneyed isolation. It might be a stretch to say that Priscilla depicts Elvis as a predator – though the fact of Priscilla’s age is glaring and constant – but the film damns him in every other way. He is manipulative, unfaithful, deeply insincere – a man lost in the noise of his own celebrity.

In some ways, Priscilla can be seen as a corrective to last year’s Elvis, the flashy, indulgent funfair-ride Presley biopic directed by Baz Luhrmann. Elvis was interested in the myth of its subject: the hip shakes, the screams, the scheming Colonel behind his downfall. Priscilla, on the other hand, is interested in the person behind the myth. Elvis is ostensibly a supporting player, but the film is trapped, along with Priscilla, in his Jupiterian orbit.