Feature movie review: Priscilla 

• A24 Pictures

If you're a fan of director Sofia Coppola's oeuvre—most specifically, of her 2006 Marie Antoinette—your ears had to perk up a little during the opening credits of Priscilla. The song that plays over the introductory moments of Coppola's latest feature, based on the memoir of Priscilla Presley, is the Ramones' 1980 cover of The Ronettes' "Baby, I Love You," a choice that evokes the funky 1980s new-wave soundtrack that Coppola opted for in portraying the 18th-century French monarchy. Perhaps this movie—perhaps not coincidentally, one that's also about what it's like to be the wife of The King—would inject a similar energy into the formulas of the cinematic biopic.

Then Priscilla turned out to be ... fine. It's good, even, mostly thanks to Cailee Spaeny's performance as Priscilla. But I kept looking for the fingerprints of this particular filmmaker on this story, featuring an oft-chronicled famous American whose own story was told in a movie just last year. And as the narrative moved through Priscilla Presley's Elvis years, I really couldn't find those fingerprints.

Part of it comes from the dutifully chronological structure, beginning in 1959 with the then-14-year-old Priscilla Bealieu meeting Elvis (Jacob Elordi) while she was living with her mother and stepfather on an American military base in Germany at the same time 24-year-old Elvis was stationed there. To Coppola's credit, she opts against what would have been a completely understandable contemporary perspective of making their initial encounter seem creepy and predatory, focusing instead on the perspective of a starstruck girl living out a fantasy. From there, however, the narrative mostly moves at a fairly deliberate pace through key bullet points in the evolution of their relationship: a long-distance phase once Elvis moves back to the states; her eventual relocation to Memphis while still in high school; the early, happier days of their marriage; the gradual disintegration of that marriage through rumored affairs with his movie co-stars and his increasing drug use at the dawn of his Vegas years.

Priscilla does always center Priscilla, though, and that's what allows the filmmaker to find the strongest material in her lead actor. Spaeny turns in quite a remarkable physical performance, capturing the way a young teenager would have responded to this improbable encounter with celebrity. Her eyes and her body language always feel perfect for the moment at hand, whether it's feeling the eyes of others on her as her proximity to fame becomes known to schoolmates, or responding with confusion to Elvis's insistence that they shouldn't have intercourse. Coppola's narrative arc is all about someone whose life never feels within her own control—from the requirements of her family to her treatment at the hands of Elvis, who often treats her like a dress-up doll when deciding on her clothes and even the color of her hair—and it would have been easy for that to result in a performance that feels too passive. Spaeny grasps how to make Priscilla both someone who feels unable to guide her own life and someone who clearly wants to.

Yet there is still the disappointment that Priscilla doesn't unfold with more snap, more filmmaking personality. For every occasional flash of creativity—like a montage of Elvis and Priscilla spending days together in bed, marked only by the Graceland servants bringing and removing food trays—there's a bit of tiptoeing around the edges of the story, like showing Elvis introducing Priscilla to pill-popping without ever really indicating any consequences. All of the key events are there, and they're all generally interesting. What's missing is that ineffable thing that makes you so glad you watched this artist's interpretation, rather than simply reading Priscilla's memoir.

The film ends abruptly, if aptly, with Priscilla's separation from Elvis in 1972, driving out of Graceland to find out what life on her own looks like. As she does so, we hear another slightly anachronistic song play: Dolly Parton's original 1974 version of "I Will Always Love You." It's a bit surprisingly on-the-nose as an emotional underscore, but it also feels somehow indicative that Coppola reaches into the future for her song choice, but only by a couple of years. We've seen the evidence of how dynamic she can be when she reaches just a little bit farther.