Bowie v Elvis: How rock stars took over Cannes

Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, David Cronenberg, K-Stew. The Cannes organisers have certainly rallied the A-list troops for the rabidly anticipated 75th edition of the film festival, which kicks off today. After last year’s Covid instalment – an understandably muted, half-mast affair – the promise this year is a full blast of Cannes delirium, with rumoured controversies, proper parties and paparazzi galore.

If this suggests a rocking good time, selectors are tripling down on that threat with air-guitar largesse, by unveiling a hat-trick of high-profile features about music legends: Elvis Presley, David Bowie and Jerry Lee Lewis. The latter two are documentaries, while Elvis is a full-blown jukebox biopic from Baz Luhrmann, who hasn’t made a film since 2013’s Cannes curtain-raiser The Great Gatsby.

First up is Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, a breezy-looking, 73-minute portrait of one of rock ’n’ roll’s original wild men, whose career nose-dived when he married his 13-year-old cousin. Not since his own 1989 biopic Great Balls of Fire! has Lewis had a whole feature to call his own, although it is unlikely that the 86-year-old will be hotfooting it to the Riviera.

Just hours later, in a midnight spot on Sunday, Moonage Daydream will be a massive hot ticket. It promises nirvana for Bowie fans, who will be champing at the bit from the moment it’s unveiled. What makes it so buzzy is the fact that it’s not a standard digest, but an impressively dynamic piece of heady, visually wild, sonically electrifying cinema, with not a platitudinous talking head in sight.

In fact, the person doing most of the talking, as the film powers through the whole span of his career, is Bowie himself. Director Brett Morgen was granted unique access to the late icon’s complete personal archives from his estate, and has woven them into a sort of mosaic-cum-explainer, packed with so many incisive juxtapositions per minute you could get dizzy. Previously unseen footage from shows – there’s a live Let’s Dance that handily beats the one on record – gets pride of place. I’m lucky enough to have already seen it, but hang tight: the film will get a theatrical release in awards season, before heading to HBO next spring.

Finally, Elvis, which will be one of the last major premieres to grace Cannes next Wednesday. This is Luhrmann gunning for his slice of that Rocketman/Bohemian Rhapsody hoopla, centring on a much-hyped, James Dean-like performance from Austin Butler. Early word says it’s all about the struggle for The King’s creative soul – the battles he fought to stay his own man, while manager Col Tom Parker (Hanks) tried to milk his talents for commercial gain. Reactions flooding in here will be all-important to the film’s awards hopes, but the wait for it to come out, you’ll be grateful to hear, is much shorter – it’ll be in cinemas everywhere from late June.

While Cannes has loved to rock in years gone by (Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy in 2015, Elton John biopic Rocketman in 2015), the festival has never quite gone to town with music flicks like it’s doing this time. Rock on.

Eight more highlights – and potential lowlights – on the French Riviera

1. The most ubiquitous star

Last year, there was no escaping Léa Seydoux, who had four films here. In 2022, she’s getting off comparatively lightly with a mere two – Crimes of the Future and Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning – but has bounced back by announcing that she’ll be imminently shooting a remake of Emmanuelle, too. Other than Seydoux, no one will be everywhere quite as breathlessly as Tom Cruise, who’s returning to celebrate Top Gun: Maverick, 30 years after Far and Away closed the 1992 event. Everyone in town will be craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Cruise on the red carpet, before the festival serenades him with an official tribute.

2. The premium red carpet moment

Cruise climbing the Palais steps will make every front page, but there are plenty of other Cannes big-hitters coming, who’ve iced the cake by deploying major star power. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis might have the relatively unknown Austin Butler in the lead, but Hanks will pick up the slack; David Cronenberg’s latest has Viggo Mortensen, the inevitable Seydoux, and 2018 juror Kristen Stewart out front. Plus, George Miller will be returning with his intriguing fantasy romance Three Thousand Years of Longing, pairing Idris Elba with Tilda Swinton.

3. The splashiest party

Though last year’s Cannes managed to go ahead eventually, in July, it was hardly the festival of anyone’s dreams. Film-star turnout was at an all-time low, swanky celebrations around town much reduced. This year will make up for lost time, especially with the likes of Luhrmann, K-Stew and the two Toms – Cruise and Hanks – swanning about. You can expect Warner Bros to be pushing the boat out with Elvis, and laying on a no-expense-spared party complete with the appropriate set-list performed in the style of the King of Rock and Roll. Making a fuss of a film is a crucial way to cement early Oscar buzz.

4. The weirdest film

Trust Cornwall to spawn something as off-the-wall as Enys Men, the follow-up to 2019’s Bait from buzzy eclecticist Mark Jenkin. A woman on a deserted island has one job: to check in daily on a crop of rare flowers. Haunted by the ghosts of miners and lifeboatmen, her existence is a bizarre, looping ritual, crucially built around dropping a stone down a mine shaft. A lichen infestation spreads from the flowers to a large scar over her midriff. Oh, and there’s a malign standing stone which, without warning, shows up at her front door.

5. The most conspicuous absentee

Netflix. Once upon a time, the streaming giant was welcomed to the Croisette, with such in-house-funded films as Okja competing for the Palme d’Or. Since 2017, Netflix has been distributor non grata, because of the French government’s policy on 15-month theatrical windows before films can drop on subscription services. Negotiations recur annually, but with neither side budging, such hotly anticipated titles as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, will be forced to wait for autumn exposure instead.

6. The most likely walkout

This honour has been called already by Cronenberg, that master of itchy-feet controversy, who has declared that his competition entry Crimes of the Future is guaranteed to cause fuming offence. Depending on how closely the plot follows the director’s own shoestring 1970 feature of the same name – which ended with the kidnapping of a five-year-old girl by a paedophile ring, who attempt to induce her pregnancy with experimental drugs – a fair amount of apoplectic stomping to the exits looks certain.

7. The likeliest flop

Playing guess-the-turkey is a prize sport for Cannes habitués. It’s rarely a good sign for a studio to put on a black-tie gala for a film without showing the film to the press first, but that’s happening, perhaps worryingly, with Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing. Meanwhile, Lukas Dhont – who is in contention with Close – may be a whipping boy. His 2018 drama Girl, about a trans ballerina, was criticised for being voyeuristic and outdated.

8. The most cloak-and-dagger comeback

Being hawked for sale on the industry side of the festival – far from the prying eyes of any press or juries – is a thriller called Peter Five Eight, starring none other than Kevin Spacey. An industry pariah since 2017, when multiple allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced, Spacey has struggled to get much off the ground; his long-completed Gore Vidal biopic was shelved. In this, he’s playing Peter, “a charismatic man in a black sedan who shows up in a small mountainside community”.