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The King of Rock and Roll may have left the proverbial building 45 years ago, but his music and memory still burn. His chaotic and tragic life has been recounted many times throughout the last half-century, but nothing like what spectacle-loving Baz Luhrmann has delivered in “Elvis,” his film about the singer’s life.

Luhrmann’s style is as grandiose and messy as the subject’s history, which juxtaposes well with the overall story, but the first 30 minutes of the film hardly allow the viewer to breathe through constant camera movement, rapid-fire exposition and overall cacophony of sound — and it might be too much for some audience members (especially the ones who were fans of Presley when he was still around).

If you can adjust, and I hope you can, the fine film succeeds mainly because of the lead performance. But it falls short on several other fronts, keeping it from really breaking through the noise.

With all that tumultuous style, Luhrmann and co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce’s script suffers from uneven pacing, side characters with little to no depth and some truly atrocious moments of dialogue.

However, a lot of that is forgiven by the star-making performance from Austin Butler, who takes on Presley in stunning fashion. Because of Presley’s continued fame, there are impersonators of varying quality in every country on the planet, but Butler’s performance goes beyond mere impersonation: He embodies The King with all the smolder, bravado and heart necessary to give him the depth that we miss from those sequined Vegas sideshows. Not to mention, he sounds so much like him it’s hard to tell where his voice stops, and Presley’s begins.

The film follows Presley’s life from his youth “discovering” Black blues singers and gospel revivals, to his “discovery” by Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). In fact, the film is probably more about the Colonel than about Elvis in many respects. Parker acts as a narrator to the story as a whole, recounting his time with Presley as he dies in a Las Vegas hospital in 1997.

Parker even calls himself out for being a con man from the get-go, recalling that he acted as the “Snowman,” an old carnival trick where he gets the people to look at one thing while he takes all their money.

And we see him swindle and weasel his way into the Presley family’s trust, slowly leading to the singer’s ultimate and untimely demise.

While Hanks has proven his talents time and time again, his portrayal of the Colonel dips a little too far into caricature. Given Parker was himself a character created by the Dutch immigrant to conceal his real identity, however, it may have been an acting choice made by Hanks to play him that way, albeit to mediocre success. Maybe it’s just the attempted accent or the fat suit that irked me, both things I sincerely wish Hollywood would stop doing.

There are a lot of great and defining moments in the film that give you the shivers and the shakes, mostly during the re-creations of Presley’s performances which Luhrmann captures so incredibly well. From focusing not only on the gyrating Butler’s performance but also on the salivating audience watching it. You can feel the temperature rising higher in their souls before they finally burst out in screams for the King. It’s palpable.

Likewise, when Luhrmann slows things down in those introspective moments of realness between Presley and Priscilla (Olivia DeJong), his parents (Helen Thompson and Richard Roxburgh), B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and even Parker, those moments are captured well.

Where the film falls short is with its glossing over of certain aspects of the singer’s life. The film sanitizes his relationship with Priscilla by simply stating she was a “teenager” when they met — she was 14, Presley was 24.

It also falls short of the mark in connecting Presley with the Black community that heavily influenced him. It does go further than another biopic may have done, say, 10 years ago, but it still paints him as something unique, when in reality he copied what he’d seen and heard Black musicians doing. (Not that that negates his talent.)

The film also seems to neglect the women of Presley’s life with stunningly bad dialogue and behavior that borders on shrewish. Considering how pivotal the ladies of his life were, the film does them a great disservice.

No matter how brilliantly captivating Butler’s performance is, nor how well Luhrmann’s style works alongside Presley’s life story, nitpicky problems bring “Elvis” down a whole octave.

On screens this week: Get ready for more memes from that aunt you’re still friends with on Facebook, because “Minions: The Rise of Gru” opens in theaters. Regency rom com “Mr. Malcolm’s List” arrives for all you fans of British romance in pretty dresses (including this critic who will have a full review on it in next week’s GO!). And premiering on Hulu is “The Princess,” about a butt-kicking, you guessed it, princess who refuses to wed the guy to whom she’s betrothed.