Elvis is is an engaging,  chaotic, and revealing mess of a movie. It is a dizzying tale of sex, faith, and money that is painfully schizophrenic.

Here we have two movies in one, lurching between a lavishly overproduced and surprisingly glib pop legend tale and a tragic melodrama more like an aria from Candide.

For reasons that are incomprehensible to me and devastating to the movie, this movie has a narrative revolving around two characters with two competing stories  – the rise and fall of Elvis as played by Austin Butler, and the overshadowing of Butler by Elvis’s creepy manager, the dread and mysterious Col. Tom Parker as played by Tom Hanks.

How is it even possible to distract attention from the life of someone as famous as Elvis Presley with a fat, mean, transparently dishonest figure like Col. Parker as portrayed in this movie?

And why would you? I get that Hanks is the bigger star, and costs a lot of money,  but really?

Hank’s presence in the movie throws it entirely off-balance since he is a much bigger star than poor Butler and was thus given a role way out of proportion to his contribution to the movie.

Hanks looked awful in his prosthetic make-up as he hovered, popped up, spied, lied, stole, and eavesdropped like Dracula hunting for fresh blood when the sun sets.

In Dracula, Bela Legosi is not nearly as evil and menacing as the Hanks character is in Elvis.

It is difficult to imagine any rational adult accepting or trusting this awful person’s advice about crossing the street, let alone managing a billion-dollar career for years.

Was Elvis that naive or blind?

In this film, Elvis is brilliant for a few minutes and passionate about his music; then, like the real Elvis, he begins a tragic and relentless decline, weak, shallow and clueless, and his life comes apart, bit by bit, headline by headline.

The make-up job on Hanks is awful and distracting, especially for a character we soon come to dread to see. Col. Parker narrates much of the movie in indecipherable commentary and a mangled accent (Parker was Dutch.)

One review I read described the production design as “garish and ghoulish,” which seemed generous.

This version of Presley’s life made the last dreary Batman movie seem like the Muppets. The reality is disturbing enough; did we need to add all this dark and gloomy cinematic trickery and mythology to it?

The film is too long by a third, and Elvis’s inevitable and torturous decline (I mean, we all know how the story ends) becomes interminable, even dull. He seems to be dying a hundred times, and when he goes, we get only to see a newspaper headline.

This is a shame.

Elvis Presley is the most significant cultural figure in modern American history. As a teenager, his instincts drew him to think about blending blues, gospel pop, and country (primarily African American music) into a new kind of musical culture that upended the music industry and became rock n’ roll.

It was a great first act for a poor,  young Southern boy whose father spent time in jail and whose mother, Gladys, adored and loved him. He returned the favor.

But the problem with Presley is that he never had a second Great Act.

He seemed overwhelmed almost from the first.

His career grew tasteless and demeaning as he grew older. His Hollywood movies made lots of money, but no one confused him with a real actor, and his reputation steadily declined.

His stint in Las Vegas, which preceded his very early death at 42, was also lucrative, but it was grotesque and the antithesis of the fantastic work when he was just a kid.

Butler is a gifted singer, but he could never convey the power of Elvis’s voice or his intuition for understanding the power and rhythm of African-American music. He didn’t really replicate Elvis.

Presley was the first white musician to sing the blues or gospel, and this rocked the music industry to the core and changed it for good.

Elvis was discovered in 1954 by the famed Sun Records Producer  Sam Phillips. Phillips had a small southern record company, and his dream was to find a white singer to embrace and explore black music.

One song continued to haunt Sam, a melancholy ballad called ‘Without You’ that the song publisher Red Wortham had given him.

Something about it drew him – for all of its sentimentality; there was a quality of vulnerability about it. He thought that he’d like to have someone come in and give it a try. The only one he could think of was a kid who had stopped by the previous summer and paid $4 to cut a ‘personal’ record for his mother.

The kid was Elvis, and that record changed the history of our culture for good. Director Baz Luhrmann skipped over it so quickly that its significance and power were almost lost.

It was perhaps the most significant scene in the movie.

The movie has all kinds of tech pyro-technics, from cartoons to whirling records. It will make you dizzy, and these tricks add nothing to the film.

The make-up people will never get an Oscar for this movie; Hanks looked like the Marshmallow man in Ghost Busters, only a lot creepier.

His character was disturbing; he was forever lurking, peeking, snooping, lying, manipulating, and plotting at every turn.

Although Luhrmann blames him for every mistake and wrong turn Presley makes, including his death, the film offers us a fresh look at Presley that is far from flattering.

Like his father, Vernon, who was supposed to be looking out for his interests, Presley seems puzzled and confused. Brilliantly intuitive about the music he hears from black musicians – the first 20 minutes of the movie are brilliant, he seems almost clueless from there.

He doesn’t have anything thoughtful or self-aware to say about the revolution he unleashed or any coherent sense of what else he wants to accomplish musically, other than make more money. The movie suggests it was all Col. Parker’s fault. He was sleazy and corrupt, but a magician as well?

As played by Butler, Elvis is good at heart and loves his mother too much, but he doesn’t seem too sharp. He seemed to have no creative vision or drive beyond the mega-concerns that raked in big bucks and his tacky costumes. Like every star in every movie, he adores his young daughter, but not enough to get help for the addiction that is destroying his marriage.

Elvis indeed drove teenage girls wild with his “wiggling and jiggling,” as shocked old farts in Tennesse described it. Still, his brilliant singing was utterly overwhelmed by Butler’s herky-jerky twitching and jumping up and down suggestively. He looked like he was sticking his finger in a lit socket or sitting in the electric chair.

The physicality of his music was important, but it wasn’t the most important thing about his music. That point was almost totally lost.

I’m not a teenage girl, but Butler never captured Presley’s powerful sexuality, which was so important. Perhaps it’s asking too much for any singer to be Presley.

While researching this review, I learned that Elvis Presley never wrote a song in his entire musical career.

He was given co-writing credit on many pieces because his label and manager demanded that songwriters give up  50 percent of the credit before Presley would record it. What he had were amazing instincts, at least for a while.

Like his father Vernon, as portrayed in the movie, he doesn’t seem to notice that Col. Parker (who wasn’t a colonel or a “Tom” or a “Parker”) was unfailingly greedy, evil, and dishonest.

The question that has swirled around Presley for years is why he never had a great second or third act, as many performers have – Springsteen, McCartney,  Bowie, Dylan, Van Morrison, and the Rolling Stones.

Was his natural talent soaking up the music he heard as a child or did his awful manager undo him?

Luhrmann’s “Elvis” doesn’t even attempt to answer the question. We are left still wondering.

The movie suggests that every bad thing that happened to Presley after his stunning early success was brought about by his Col. Parker, who cared only about money and seemed to have been modeled after Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Later, it was found that Parker cheated Elvis out of a lot of money.

Still, it is hard for me to accept that Presley himself is in no way responsible for a series of wrong and disastrous money-driven decision after another. Lots of successful musicians started out poor, few superstars immolated in this way.

These choices denigrated his fame, drove him to drugs, and eventually caused his addiction to drugs and death.

I wanted to understand these choices – including the hiring of Parker – better.

It’s just too pat and shallow. This Elvis in the movie never once challenged Walker successfully or noticed that he was setting his career, reputation, and creativity on fire, not to mention slowly overworking him to death.

This movie blew a chance to introduce Presley to a new generation of music lovers who only know him as the bloated Vegas freak who could barely stand up on stage at the end.

That’s unfortunate because Presley’s genius has affected everyone who follows music or pop culture and continues to resonate and re-shape our complete understanding of music and our own culture.

His voice was terrific at the beginning. The movie missed this also.

Luhrmann makes it clear that Presley and many other famous musicians and bands took much of their music and owe much of their fame to African-American musicians and singers.

They were only belatedly recognized and never compensated for their work.

B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Little Richard (Alton Mason) appear in the movie, but the chance to dramatize their work and Presley’s discovery of them was also blown. These scenes were lifeless (except for Mason) and had no drama and punch.

Presley is a uniquely fascinating American character, and I’m glad I saw the movie and got the chance to re-think Presley’s life and death. People who loved him and followed his career will find it stimulating.

Famous people who die young and tragically capture our imaginations for generations. They are important.

I hope we get another crack at it. I’m sorry Luhrmann, a respected and gifted director, mucked this one up by trying to tell two stories in one, one tragic and depressing, the other as dark as a horror movie.