Up close with the king in ‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’.

“EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert”

By ALISSA WILKINSON

Concert films can serve many purposes — extending a brand, surfacing footage of a historical moment, pulling cash from fans’ pockets — but at their best, they make you feel like you’re at, well, a concert. “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” (in theaters) has a gimmicky title, but thankfully its director, Baz Luhrmann, did not make a gimmicky concert film. This is a fun movie and a revealing one, too.

Four years ago, Luhrmann released “Elvis,” the spangly biopic starring Austin Butler. In the process of making that film, the director learned about some footage shot for two 1970s concert films; eventually he located the negatives in a place that sounds like a joke but isn’t: Warner Bros. vaults buried in underground salt mines in Kansas. These recordings, plus some little-seen footage from the Graceland Archives, were restored for “EPiC,” which functions briefly as an autobiographical film narrated by Presley — in excerpts from interviews, he tells you about his time in the military and in Hollywood — before pivoting into a full-scale concert.

At the start, we hear him say, “Some people wonder why I can’t stand still while I’m singing; I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it.” That’s a good description of Luhrmann’s filmmaking, too, which zings and pings and never stops moving, making director and subject a great match. As Presley sings, we see performances from several concerts, sometimes from different eras, seamlessly stitched together, so we’re not just enjoying the music but also getting a kind of panoramic view of his career. Occasionally a snippet of biographical detail surfaces, always with a clip from an interview or sometimes a darker hint. (A montage of Col. Tom Parker, his controlling manager, plays while Presley sings “You’re the Devil in Disguise.”) There are plenty of familiar tunes and some playful bits, too. At one point he rolls back and forth between “Little Sister” and The Beatles’ “Get Back,” to the delight of the audience.

But the most fun part of “EPiC” is getting up close to the man himself, who is mostly jocular and wholly invested in the music. Though he begins to show signs of weariness in footage that seems drawn from his later years, the movie doesn’t focus on his drug-addled demise. Instead, we see him playing to the crowd, joking with his backup singers and losing himself in songs he’s sung thousands of times before. We get close to his face as he grins and winks, a view you’d never get from a seat at the show. You get a sense of his personality in a way that feels intimate and uncommon.

Of course, there’s plenty about Presley’s life that’s left out of “EPiC,” because, as with a concert, this isn’t supposed to be a warts-and-all look at the star. What you’ve come for is a good time, an entertainer at his best, full of energy and charisma and raw appeal. It’s a fan’s dream, to be sure. But in getting so close to a man who has so often been turned into a caricature, “EPiC” goes beyond just the concert: We enjoy both the performance and the man who loved nothing more than to perform.