A ranking of the best screen performances of Elvis Presley

Michael Shannon isn’t necessarily the first actor one might think of to play The King. But 2016’s Elvis & Nixon, from director Liza Johnson, uses the performer’s steely intensity to wonderful counterbalancing effect in serving up a slyly comedic, speculative version of one of the oddest real-life episodes of Presley’s offstage career: his meeting with President Richard Nixon (played by Kevin Spacey) on December 21, 1970. Elvis & Nixon presents Presley here as vaguely concerned about “what’s going on in the streets,” but chiefly obsessed with obtaining a federal law enforcement badge, and the appropriated glory that would (in his mind) bestow. A big part of the film is about the moving parts of this unlikely encounter. But as Presley gleefully ignores dictated protocols (is it sly gamesmanship, entitled forgetfulness, or some combination of the two?), the meeting itself quickly turns into a mutual stroke session and bitch-fest about communists and left-wingers—and thus an engaging, amusing rumination on some of the psychological blindspots and downfalls of power and celebrity.

No singing is really indulged, but Shannon convincingly captures the softer parts of Presley’s vocal register. And in two captivating monologues—one about existing as an unseeable object, a physical stand-in for people’s recollections of their first kiss or other formative memories; another about the stillborn death of his twin brother, and bearing in life the lot for two people—Shannon delivers a soul-snapshot of The King’s swallowed, little-boy-lost hurt. [Brent Simon]