Elvis Presley has not exactly vanished from popular culture but his position is greatly diminished. When the private equity fund Authentic Brands Group acquired a majority share in Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2013, estate income, memorabilia sales, visits to Graceland and bookings for Elvis impersonators were all in decline, while two Elvis-based stage shows had flopped. “The reason brands die as they get older is because the older generation goes away,” one brand expert told Rolling Stone. “If you don’t push those brands to the younger generation at all times, eventually you age yourself out. And that’s what was going on with Elvis.”

Elvis has 14.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify: fewer than Elton John, David Bowie and the Beatles, more than Prince and Bob Dylan, about the same as Bruce Springsteen. But Queen’s Elvis pastiche Crazy Little Thing Called Love is more popular than all but one of Elvis’s own songs, and that one song, Can’t Help Falling in Love, is only as big as it is because of an appearance in Crazy Rich Asians. As for his influence on today’s major artists, only Jack White and, arguably, Eminem have a clear debt to Elvis, whereas there are legions of heirs to Bowie, Dylan, Michael Jackson or Stevie Nicks. He’s not just old; he’s old in the wrong way.

This explains why Elvis was made with the energetic cooperation of Elvis Presley Enterprises and the endorsement of the singer’s surviving family members. The idea must have been that the director who blitzed Shakespeare and F Scott Fitzgerald into very long music videos would turn on Generation Z to the glory of the King. Luhrmann has made an $85 million, 159-minute advertisement for Elvis Presley, yet still manages to sell him short where it matters most.

The critics who wrote about Elvis after his death in 1977, at the age of 42, would be astonished that his reputation would ever require such a booster injection. To them he was synonymous with not just rock’n’roll but American culture. Remarking on the atomisation of rock fandom, Lester Bangs wrote in his obituary: “I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” Greil Marcus went further in his 1991 book Dead Elvis, comparing the cultural impact of Elvis’s death to the passing of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Elvis did not simply change musical history, though of course he did that. He changed history as such, and in doing so became history.” Public Enemy’s Chuck D delivered a colossal backhanded compliment in 1989’s Fight the Power when he rapped “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me”. Chuck needed to attack a symbol of monolithic white American culture and that could only be Elvis. To dismiss him so heretically was to acknowledge his stature.

Marcus was right to say that Elvis became history but that’s not the same thing as retaining relevance for new generations. The rock’n’roll of the Fifties, which has long been sidelined even on US classic-rock radio, feels ancient, like a black-and-white movie. Even from that era, none of Elvis’s songs have the undeniable visceral jolt of Tutti Frutti or Great Balls of Fire. You have to imagine your way back to a more sedate time to apprehend the youthquake mayhem caused by Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. The fact that Elvis didn’t write his own songs (not unusual at the time) increases this sense of temporal otherness, placing him closer to Frank Sinatra than the Beatles. Or perhaps Marilyn Monroe: an icon who your grandparents wanted to sleep with. He doesn’t have that one classic album that sells to each new generation like Rumours or Blue do. And the idea that he was just a pretty white boy who appropriated rock’n’roll from far more talented black artists, though grossly simplistic, has become received wisdom. For all these reasons, he is seen as more of a historical event than an enduring inspiration.

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In Dead Elvis, Marcus wrestles with the stereotype of Elvis that had taken hold even before his death: the idiot savant whose primary talent was erotic and who was played like a marionette by his sinister manager Colonel Tom Parker; the accidental revolutionary who became a tourist attraction. In this version of the story Elvis gets credit for the initial energy flash which lasted from That’s All Right in 1954 to his induction into the army four years later, and for his unexpectedly triumphant 1968 comeback, but gets scolded for squandering his talent on schlock, his fortune on trash, and his health on junk food and pills. This tale has a tragic, mythic quality which makes him a microcosm of America: from young, scrappy and hungry to bloated, decadent and grotesque. What it doesn’t do is explain what that talent was in the first place.

Yet this is exactly the story Luhrmann has chosen to tell. He seems to have taken the 2007 parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story as a how-to manual, revelling in every cradle-to-grave biopic cliché you can think of, and dialogue that could have been written by low-rent AI: “The world needs to hear you sing, Elvis!” Poor old Elvis can’t turn on the television without seeing a report of some epochal assassination. In one frankly astonishing scene, the Manson clan’s killing of Sharon Tate happens just 24 hours before the catastrophe at Altamont rather than, as boring reality would have it, four months earlier. What any of this has to do with Elvis, a man so disconnected from the upheavals of the Sixties that he asked President Nixon to make him a federal narcotics agent, I have no idea.

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So far, so silly but Luhrmann makes the fundamentally terrible decision to have the story narrated by Tom Hanks as Parker, a walking distraction with absurd fat-man prosthetics and an accent that is supposed to be Dutch but sounds more like a Nazi officer in a goofy war movie. Thus we understand what Parker saw in Elvis (dollar signs) but not what Elvis saw in himself. The artist, well-played by the terrifically attractive Austin Butler, comes across as a shallow hillbilly angel torn to pieces by a corrupt world when all he wants to do is sing. Luhrmann pays loving attention to Elvis’s outrageous, explosive sexuality (“Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimetre, tens of thousands of people went berserk,” observed Lester Bangs), but to the extent that he becomes a visual phenomenon rather than a musical one. We never understand why millions of girls who weren’t personally throwing their knickers at him thrilled to his records in their bedrooms — and millions of boys, too. Luhrmann being Luhrmann, he pumps up Elvis’s music with anachronistic new interpretations by Doja Cat and Eminem, as if unable to trust in the power of the real thing.

To really convey the tragedy of Elvis’s final years, trapped and sedated in Las Vegas like a bear in a gilded cage, you’d need a director who was at least sceptical of excess if not nauseated by it. Luhrmann, the man whose sole interest in The Great Gatsby was the parties, is not that director. The movie only really comes alive in Vegas, when everything is too loud, too bright, too fast, too much. By contrast, the earlier scenes of Elvis hanging out in blues clubs on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee have all the rootsy authenticity of an Eighties beer commercial. History says that Elvis was not at his finest in Vegas; the camera says more, more, more.

Elvis’s talent as a singer and arranger is easily underrated. The first time the New York Times wrote about him, in June 1956, it sneered: “Mr Presley has no discernible singing ability. His speciality is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. For the ear he is an unutterable bore.” After Elvis’s death, the justifiably envious rock’n’roll pioneer Chuck Berry summed up his legacy with a patronising shrug: “boop, boop, boop; shake your leg; fabulous teen music; the Fifties; his movies.” Forty-five years later, it is even harder to assess the nature of Elvis’s brilliance.

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The popular notion that Elvis was effectively performing musical blackface, and that any pouting, hip-thrusting white boy could have played that role in a racist industry, completely misses his X-factor. It’s true that black, queer Little Richard couldn’t go as far as Elvis did, but then nor could straight, white Carl Perkins. Only Elvis had the voice, charisma and taste to synthesise blues, country, gospel and pop in a way that made him, at the time, a unifying figure rather than an exploitative one. Certainly nobody close to him doubted his genuine affection for black music and musicians. “It was like two feuding clans who had been brought together by marriage,” said Marion Keisker of Sun Records, which released Elvis’s first five singles. Even Chuck D, modifying his claim in Fight the Power that Elvis was “straight-up racist”, admitted that he considered the music industry bigoted rather than Elvis himself.

Elvis had a good (though far from infallible) ear for material. He was exacting in the studio, demanding around 30 takes of Hound Dog even when everybody else in the room thought they’d nailed it. He never just turned up and sang. Luhrmann does grant him one scene of real creativity, in which he whips his vast band through a dramatic new arrangement of That’s All Right for the first show of his Las Vegas residency, dashing madly from player to player. He knew what people wanted to hear and he loved giving it to them. His ambition wasn’t imposed on him by Parker; it was a burning flame.

Luhrmann traffics in myths and fairy tales: nobody went to Moulin Rouge! expecting an accurate portrayal of turn-of-the-century Montmartre. Elvis, which has underperformed but still topped the US box office, has found an audience with its hectic, melodramatic megamix of the singer’s life. But many of those moviegoers will be learning about Elvis in detail for the first time and will leave with the impression of a sweet, somewhat dim, easily manipulated sexual dynamo — a “virtuoso of hootchy-kootchy”, as the New York Times sniffed in 1956 — rather than a transformative musical force.

“Nobody’s going to remember me,” Elvis frets to his wife Priscilla towards the end of the movie. “I never made anything lasting.” Presumably we are meant to think that he is completely wrong because his legend will live forever but Luhrmann never illuminates, nor seems to care about illuminating, the talent upon which that legend was built. The thick sediment of mythology and kitsch that Greil Marcus believed got in the way of appreciating Elvis is exactly what Luhrmann is interested in. Marcus quoted, and challenged, a crushing line from the critic James Wolcott: “As a musical artist [Elvis] doesn’t exist — he doesn’t begin to exist.” It’s unfortunate that the man entrusted with telling his story to a new generation would seem to agree.

Over the following ten weeks barely a day elapsed without snow falling and freezing and falling, bringing with it an unexpected, extended and for some unwelcome suspension of ordinary lives. Vast drifts, sometimes wind-whipped to the height of four grown men, wreaked havoc with transport: roads became impassable, train tracks iced over, airports proved unusable with up to a foot of snow burying the Gatwick runways. Farmers tried desperately to save their starving animals as well as their livelihoods. Dartmoor sheep became unreachable, lost in snowy hillocks and turning cannibalistic. Supermarkets ran out of supplies, villages were cut off, pubs remained silent and whole communities found themselves locked in.

The relentlessness of the weather — and not knowing when its restrictions would end — had a debilitating effect on national morale. The young, in particular, grew restless as the winter dragged on; as any parent who waved a teenager off to school on Monday can tell you, they’re not made to sit indoors for weeks on end. In 1962, young people’s nascent dissatisfaction with the old way of doing things began to accelerate towards what, two years later, the American writer and style-setter Diana Vreeland termed a “youthquake”.

By this point, a Conservative government had been in place for 12 years, led since 1957 by Harold Macmillan — a distinguished veteran of both world wars. His Edwardian-moustachioed, tweedy image contrasted powerfully and not inspirationally with the youth and glamour of President Kennedy on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile the UK was creaking with centuries-old prejudices concerning class, race, religion and sexual choice. With nothing else to do that frozen winter — with time to envision an escape route from convention — the new generation decided things had to change.

Just as the current pandemic has fermented movements led by young people — from the “ditch the algorithm” protests to the BLM marches — so the silence of the winter of 1962-3 lit a fire under causes for social justice. And just as current technology has enabled an ingenious explosion of creativity — from web-based campaigning to socially-distanced theatrical productions, not to mention pioneering methods of screen-based education — so the youthful, innovative, enquiring media of the early 1960s inspired its cooped-up audiences.

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Satire, for instance, boomed. In the student-blotting-paper pages of Private Eye — which had been founded the year before by Peter Cook and a bunch of his young, clever friends — a new generation of bright young things took aim at the establishment. And while Private Eye provided an alternative to the conventional, buttoned-up, libel-fearing press, television also reached out to a newly captive audience reluctant or unable to brave the snowy conditions outside. Presented by 23-year-old Cambridge graduate David Frost, That Was the Week That Was launched in December 1962 on the BBC. The live satirical programme, a quasi-forerunner of Have I Got News For You, regularly attracted 12 million viewers, targeting the sacred trinity of Church, Monarchy and Government.

The satire boom fed off the rumours that had been drifting through the previous months, but gathered momentum that winter, surrounding one of Harold Macmillan’s ministers. John Profumo MP, the Minister for War, was said to have slept with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model, who in turn was suspected of sleeping with a Russian naval attaché, who had passed on cabinet secrets to his own government. Tangled up with these allegations were stories about Keeler’s friends, whose suspected drug-dealing, gun-toting criminality only enhanced the drama, and whose portrayal by the media often buttressed racist stereotypes. As the scrutiny of the alternative media — buoyed by its surge in popularity among a captive audience — crept ever closer, Profumo’s denials of the rumours became ever more implausible, until the truth finally exploded in the House of Commons in the summer of 1963.

Less titillating was the death of Sylvia Plath, in February 1963, when it felt as if the ice would never melt. The challenges of the miserable weather exacerbated the despair of the 30-year-old poet, whose marriage to Ted Hughes had collapsed the year before. As Plath struggled alone to deal with burst pipes and oppressive cold, while taking care of their two tiny children, existence became impossible to sustain. And hers was not the only famous and shocking death to occur that winter. In January, the health of Hugh Gaitskell, the 57-year-old leader of the Labour party who suffered from a precarious heart condition, was devastated by a voracious virus. He died shortly afterwards.

Gaitskell was replaced by a different sort of politician. Harold Wilson was a Yorkshireman. He had not been to public school and, unlike the Prime Minister, did not speak or think in a language that would have been familiar to Victorians. His “ordinariness” was symbolised by his pipe, mackintosh and preference for tinned rather than smoked salmon. While the Financial Times remarked on his “political acumen and cool toughness”, the Daily Telegraph admired his “plain living and high thinking” and his “youthful bubbly quality”. Wilson had an agenda of reforms that aimed, for instance, to tackle racial discrimination and decriminalise homosexuality. If elected Prime Minister, he promised, he would address the social iniquities of his country. He spoke for the underdog. He spoke for a youth given a new lease of life as temperatures crept up.

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But above all it was the rhythm of music that sustained the young’s spirits that freezing winter. In the gloomy Liverpool greyness — icebergs had been seen floating in the River Mersey — awareness of the glitz and energy across the sea was acute. Cool young men known as the Cunard Yanks worked as waiters and dishwashers and porters on the freight and passenger ships that criss-crossed the Atlantic. They brought back from New York evidence of a bigger, better, faster, shinier, sexier world packed with blue jeans and huge cars and, above all, the exhilarating release of music, personified in the uninhibited hip-thrusting Elvis Presley.

Bootleg jeans and bootleg records sold on the streets by the Cunard Yanks were snapped up by young Liverpudlians who thought and moved and sang and danced and lived to the musical beat that thumped out of Liverpool’s hundreds of clubs. Above ground, elderly residents found themselves gingerly negotiating the icy slabs of the city’s sloping pavements; the relative underground warmth of the cellar-based clubs guaranteed packed-in crowds, especially in the Cavern, where a band of four tousle-haired friends were sending their audiences crazy.

And down in the capital, the future talent and fame of another band was incubating in a scruffy flat at the unfashionable end of London’s Kings Road. Mick Jagger, a student at the London School of Economics with ambitions to become a Financial Times correspondent; Brian Jones and Keith Richards shared rooms, girls, spliffs, money, a rifle for taking pot shots at visiting rats, food parcels that Keith’s mum sent from Dartford and an ambition to make it as musicians. As less plucky bands cancelled gigs in London pubs and clubs due to the restrictive weather, the Rolling Stones seized every offer to be stand-ins. And as word spread that they were sizzling, their young audiences braved the extreme cold to hear this sexy, uninhibited sound. Fan numbers began to surge.

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The radio became a honeypot for those trapped by the snow and desperate for a visceral connection to the music of their generation. Radio Luxemburg became the principal audio-stage for the new pop bands. And even if you could not get through the ice to hear these bands perform live, television delivered the upcoming pop groups to the growing number of screens in sitting rooms. Twice during the winter, the four convention-oblivious lads from Liverpool, with irreverent charisma, sublime love songs and fringes long enough to rival a Grenadier’s busby, seduced viewers of ITV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars. And on 6th March 1963, when the Meteorological Office announced that the frost had disappeared from every part of the country, the Beatles’ second single “Please Please Me” hit the top of the pop charts. After three months on ice, the youthquake of the 1960s began.

As the restrictions imposed by the Covid pandemic begin to melt away, another generation will burst back into action. Months of isolation have left young people frustrated; the effects of that frustration, now that they are reunited, could be destructive or creative, or a bit of both. Will pupils accept the return of exams, which the pandemic did away with? And will they continue to campaign against the inequality exposed by the algorithm that replaced them? Will university students continue to turn over stones in search of historic racism? Or, after remote learning has stripped universities back to their most basic form will they reject them altogether? After all they’ve been through, how can we expect the young to respect the status quo? As this convulsive, world-wide hiatus ends, they will be set free, clamouring to be heard.