My mother has always been a beat ahead of musical trends; in the days before the internet professed that classical music helps calm bawling babies, she had Eine Kleine Nachtmusik rock me to sleep. And when the name “Ramona” started to be associated with the almost-eponymous punk metal band, my mother rolled her eyes and said Jim Reeves had beat both Dylan and The Ramones to it. No surprises then that she was one of the few lining up to watch the Baz Luhrmann musical biopic Elvis in its first week (it released at the theatres on June 24). Despite the fact that Elvis Presley featured prominently on many childhood birthday playlists, I was late to the party. I caught the night show this weekend and then my mother and I discussed the movie over breakfast.

Mind you, my mother is of the generation which tends to dislike actors who step in to play terrifically iconic people. No one is ever Diana enough for Princess Di or graceful enough for Grace Kelly and certainly not Charlie enough for Chaplin. I’m expecting Austin Butler to be unable to fill those blue suede shoes. I’m proved wrong.

“That boy who played Elvis did a marvellous job. At certain angles he looked very much like Elvis,” says my mother.

I sit up. This one is going to be different.

Austin Butler vs Tom Hanks: The musician and his manager

“Actually, I thought he did better than Tom Hanks, who was a little… I hate to say it… over the top,” she says, dismissive of Hollywood’s more versatile Tom in only the way a 70-year-old can be.

It also strikes me that Hanks seemed to be too much like a fiendish clown at a children’s party – an impression enhanced by all the carnival scenes and his demonic grin. We’ll put it down to our suspicious minds or just being all shook up at watching veteran Hanks be upstaged by young Butler.

Though the story of talented young musicians being robbed and manipulated by their managers is not a new one, the narrator of Elvis is in fact the conniving manager. Tom Parker (played by Hanks) as the reporter on Elvis’ life is as unreliable as Nick Carraway on the subject of Gatsby, which leads us to wonder how much we can allow ourselves to believe in the first place. After all, Parker is ingratiating at best, diabolical at worst, and while he blames “my boy’s” downfall squarely on us, his fans, of course he is quick to take the credit for his stardom.

This only makes the younger Elvis fans roll our eyes – as though we can’t see that Parker is desperately trying to evade any responsibility. It’s almost comforting that these are memories being recounted from his deathbed. We know by now that Parker spent his fortunes on a gambling habit and was later sued for his unethical management of Elvis.

The heartthrob who ruled the radio

With no internet and no access to American publications, my mother and her friends were left to swoon over Elvis’ creamy voice without knowing just how much heartbreak really went behind the Heartbreak Hotel song. She’s almost rueful of not knowing more about this man with the voice to die for. “Elvis was just a heartthrob for all of us. We enjoyed his music, we loved his looks, we admired his voice. Nothing else mattered. We didn’t know much about his background at all… we read about his life in a very superficial way,” she explains.

Elvis used to be all over the radio and even featured in school annual programmes at Our Lady Queen of the Missions School, which my mother attended in the 1960s. “There was this one year Don Bosco Park Circus was invited to join us. We danced to many Elvis numbers that night. The nuns said ‘never again’ after that.”

“You danced with a Bosco boy?” I ask, trying to conjure up an image in my head.

“I must have,” she shrugs. “To Jailhouse Rock.” It’s telling that she remembers the song more than the boy she danced with.

More than 40 years after my mother’s thrilling Elvis-fuelled dance night, I recall our year-end play at Loreto College opening with an Elvis number. Long after his gyrating hips had stopped conservative Americans in their tracks, we could still rely on the silken voice of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll to bring a chattering female audience to attention.

My mother didn’t see Elvis dancing on TV until years later. By then, he was no longer considered uncouth. “The kind of obscenities that started appearing as we grew older, made Elvis’ dance moves look positively innocent,” she bristles.

In her twenties, as a radio jockey for Calcutta B on Air India Radio, the Elvis requests continued to roll in. “Listeners dialled in to Musical Bandbox every day and asked for Elvis hits like Jailhouse Rock, or Always on My Mind and Teddy Bear. But for Lunchtime Varieties, when the compères were allowed to play what they liked, Elvis featured amongst those as well.”

My mother’s favourite was Are You Lonesome Tonight. “Absolutely no one can recreate that emotion, that tremor in the voice,” she insists.

“But Austin Butler sings most of the songs in the movie, including Are You Lonesome Tonight,” I counter.

She looks outraged.

The music of Elvis: the sound of the ’50s

It’s true, Butler’s recreation of Elvis is astounding. Elvis in white, Elvis in pink, Elvis in leather… it all comes alive with an arresting mimicry of that unmistakable drawl.

What Elvis brings to the spotlight however is not the superstar’s spiral into drug abuse or even Tom Parker’s unforgivable greed, but the influence of African American music in his songs. We see Elvis as a boy, the sole survivor of a pair of twins, being drawn into the music of Memphis. The movie reveals Elvis’ Hound Dog as a blues number being sung by a woman we imagine must be Big Mama Thornton, to whom the song was attributed. This leads one to speculate whether Elvis would have been King of Rock ’n’ Roll if he’d been a black man, or might Chuck Berry have actually stood a chance? Perhaps we should no longer be surprised that it took a white boy to make the “black” sound popular in the ’50s.

“I liked that the movie was informative but also allowed us to revisit his songs and enjoy them,” says my mother.

By the end of Elvis, The Jackson 5 are the new kids on the block. The wheels of fortune keep turning and we are shown that there will always be a new sensation in the world. This least flamboyant Baz Luhrmann movie forces one to contemplate wealth, fame and the humans we might be idolising to the point of madness, right this minute. As R&B songwriter Edward James Cooley famously wrote in a song made famous by a couple of white singers – Peggy Lee and Elvis Presley – Everybody’s got the fever, that is something you all know. Fever isn’t such a new thing, fever started long ago…