Based on the true story of the meeting of Elvis Presley, the king of Rock and Roll, who goes to the White House and asks for meeting President Richard Nixon, as he requests to become an undercover agent to track down drug dealers.
As a surreal slice of history served up nearly half a century later, it feels oddly satisfying: A reminder not just of simpler times, but of all the other wild untold stories we may never know, just because no camera was there to capture them.
It remains a naggingly slight experience: while its showbiz savvy should satiate the Elvis demographic, it feels at least a slight copout that a film where Nixon shares top billing should be so determinedly depoliticised.
When the plot juxtaposes Mr. Shannon's Elvis with professional Elvis impersonators at an airport lounge to reveal the man behind the caricature, the whole film just implodes.
The dialogue sparkles with gems of historical allusion and perceptive asides, and the actors virtually sing it; the film plays like a whirling sociopolitical operetta.
Even when I didn't buy a word being said, I went with the flow. Why? Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Tricky Dick. Watching great actors swing for the fences is something special.
What the movie, directed by Liza Johnson, lacks in factual material it replaces with whimsy and quirky humour, helped greatly by the casting of Michael Shannon as Presley and Kevin Spacey as Nixon.
A sharper movie would have pushed this bizarre incident into psychological rawness, revealing a shared sense of paranoia. Breezy, comic and disposable, Elvis & Nixon is not that film.
The spectacle of Presley visiting Nixon's buttoned-down White House in his jeweled sunglasses, silk scarf, open shirt, and giant gold belt is inherently farcical, but Elvis & Nixon might have delivered more than dumb laughs.
