Handwringing over the outcome of the 2016 presidential election should only be done director Eugene Jarecki’s way, on an extended road trip in the back of Elvis Presley’s 1963 Rolls-Royce, accompanied by a revolving cast of perspicacious celebrities, pithy pundits, and toe-tappable musicians. From a sharecropper shack in Mississippi to Sun Studios in Memphis, and, finally, west to the film studios of California and the casino stages of Vegas, Jarecki's captivating documentary traces Elvis’s rise and fall while outlining the deep fallacies in the story America tells about its greatness. Clear-eyed about Elvis’s unpaid debt to black culture, The King also displays empathy for the man in the grip of a bullying con artist who regarded him as merely a cash cow. If his rags-to-riches narrative is the ultimate expression of the American Dream, Jarecki seems to say, then we as a people should have rethought our mythology a long time ago.
Watch Eugene Jarecki speak at Sundance on the film, courtesy Deadline Hollywood.