With his malicious spark, Jerry Lee Lewis finishes off Elvis Presley’s relationship with his controversial manager, Colonel Tom Parker: “Elvis was Elvis because of Colonel Parker, who treated him like a monkey in a cage. Maybe I would have been better off with a Colonel Parker, but I’m afraid he wouldn’t have gotten along with me.”
If a year ago Todd Haynes’ documentary about the Velvet Underground brilliantly reconstructed the birth of one of the sounds that were transforming contemporary culture, this Cannes revival falls with Elvis, Australian Baz Luhrmann’s delirious biopic about the King of Rock and two documentaries together by Ethan Coen and Brett Morgen via Jerry Lee Lewis and David Bowie, respectively. If Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind excels at its virtuoso editing and reminds the world that the last rock pioneer is alive (86 years old), Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is an immersion into one of pop music’s most transformative and luminous figures, David bowie
Tom Hanks and Austin Butler at the presentation of “Elvis”. GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO (EFE)
But the king is the king and Elvis monopolizes all the spotlights of a festival that has reserved Baz Luhrmann the honors of a blockbuster starring Tom Hanks as Tom Parker and young actor Austin Butler as the barracks-born myth in Tupelo, Mississippi. Elvis is a baroque and gimmicky biopic that’s baffling to those who don’t know the story and distressing to those who do. The kitsch exaltation that the director of the Moulin Rouge builds up ends in stomach churning madness: the sum of Luhrmann and Graceland is simply too much.
But the worst thing about the film isn’t its predictable extravagance or its (albeit very careful) aesthetic (Miu Miu and Prada clothes, Manolo Blahnik shoes), but how it reduces the musician’s life to that of a sort of comic book superhero, who was destroyed by a villain with a gut and a cigar. The painful infantilization of the figure denigrates it to the point of being a fairground souvenir. Luhrmann turns his life into a children’s circus with five arenas, which brightens his human and therefore dark side. Told from his deathbed, Parker recalls how the toy was invented, a doll that obviously most interested the director of a film immortalizing the idea of this monkey in a gilded cage, for which even his elders felt pity and rival.
Both born at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio, the life of Jerry Lee Lewis comes to life in this film directed by Ethan Coen, thanks to phenomenal editing by Tricia Cooex, Coen’s professional partner and wife. Produced by Mick Jagger, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind is a documentary stitched together through archives and documents and featuring a single voice, that of a man capable of shooting one of his musicians who marries seven times – the first to 16 years old and the last at 73—also in the 50s with a 13-year-old girl, playing the piano with hands, elbows and feet in a unique way and starting over when two years ago after a heart attack he had to learn to play it again.
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An image from the documentary “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” by Ethen Coen. AP
When Luhrmann saves the broken puppet in Elvis, Coen unleashes a veritable torrent that mixes the best and the worst in a person. A guy who, in interventions and television interviews, unravels a life without going too deep but giving enough clues, a life that lives up to his nickname: The Murderer. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Lee Lewis “doesn’t play rock ‘n’ roll. Jerry Lee Lewis is rock ‘n’ roll.” A controversial icon who likes to flirt with her demons, “I’m actually a good guy,” he says.
In between, Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream surrenders to the inexhaustible figure of David Bowie. The documentary is a deeply sensual approach to the complex identity and beauty of a man who has embraced transformation and a wandering life. “I am my main experiment,” says the musician with a thousand faces, a “collector of ideas and personalities” who sought and found answers in Nietzsche, Buddha and his older brother Terry. The son of his mother’s previous marriage, it was Terry who introduced him to Jack Kerouac, the Beatniks and John Coltrane. “It changed my life,” says Bowie. His brother, who was suffering from schizophrenia, was one of the most important figures in his life, despite his constant absence. Terry’s fragile mental health soon made him realize that he was most comfortable in chaos and fragmentation. Also that “everything is garbage and garbage is wonderful”.
An image of ‘Moonage Daydream’EFE
All his musical stages are linked to the places where he lived: Brixton, Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, Japan, Australia… Musician, painter and actor Moonage Daydream insists on the transformation as the axis of his art from a messianic one Artist to space man. A true free spirit whose extreme sensitivity led him to shield himself from love until, in his maturity, he met the example of Imán. It was then that the famous Epiphany of the Heroes, one of his most universal anthems, became a reality for more than one day.
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