Teen dreams and adult nightmares in Sofia Coppola's 'Priscilla'

Dreamily gazing at the album covers of Elvis Presley was not, statistically speaking, a rare habit among American teen girls in the late 1950s and early '60s. But for Priscilla Beaulieu, teenage fantasy became a strange and surreal reality.

Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla," starring Cailee Spaeny, captures all the dreaminess, the absurdity and, finally, the nightmare of falling in love with Elvis.

Priscilla was just 14 years-old when she first met him. It was 1959. She was living in West Germany, where her Air Force officer stepfather was stationed. The swoony early scenes of Coppola's film find a solitary Priscilla sipping soda in a Navy base diner while Frankie Avalon's "Venus" (Venus, make her fair / A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair) plays around her, as covered by the band Phoenix.

A man approaches and asks if she likes Elvis. Of course, she does. Would she like to meet him? What? After some negotiations with her parents, Priscilla is sitting there on the sofa at a small party when the King of Rock 'n' Roll, himself (Jacob Elordi), strolls down the stairs. Big, big sigh.

Coppola, the writer-director of "The Virgin Suicides," "Lost in Translation" and "Somewhere," has always been innately attuned to the forming identities, swelling desires and intimate revelations of young women. In the story of Priscilla Presley (the film is based on her 1985 memoir, 'Elvis and Me'), Coppola has found a tale tailor-made for her delicately perceptive style of filmmaking.

As a movie, "Priscilla" is the diametric opposite of Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis." Where Luhrmann's film was lurid and careening, Coppola's is muted and textured. Her film is a kind of fairy tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.

"Priscilla" is, at least at first,...