Sofia Coppola turns her lens on an American icon: Priscilla Presley

In her 25 years of making films, Sofia Coppola has always found the poetry behind the headlines, the banality in the glamour, the soul in the superficial. Her dreamy, lyrical portraits of girl culture and gilded cages have brought her to 18th century Versailles, 1970s suburban Michigan, the 1860s South, noughties Calabasas and modern-day Tokyo, West Hollywood and Manhattan.

In Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me,” Coppola saw something that was glamourous and wild, something that would provide an opportunity for beautiful filmmaking in a setting she had yet to explore — the world of 1960s American rock royalty. But even she was a little surprised to find in this wholly unrelatable tale something, well, relatable: A young woman, isolated, figuring out who she is, in the shadow of a powerful man.

“Priscilla,” now playing in New York and Los Angeles and expanding nationwide Friday, emerged from a disappointment: Coppola’s ambitious adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “Custom of the Country” had fallen apart, and a friend encouraged her to dive into something else.

“(Priscilla) wasn’t looking to make a movie out of the story,” Coppola told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “But she said that because she liked my movies, she would let me do it.”

Sofia Coppola, left, and Priscilla Presley at the Venice Film Festival in September (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP, File)

Making a film about — and for — someone who is going to see it was a unique challenge. She wanted to do justice to her subject, while maintaining her creative expression. But the tension worked: “Priscilla” has landed Coppola some of her best reviews since “Lost in Translation,” and already won her star, Cailee Spaeny, the best actress award from the Venice Film Festival.

“Priscilla” is a kind of culmination of all her previous experiences, both thematically and practically. Coppola learned some time ago that to have the true creative freedom she craved, she’d have to get creative in other ways, mostly with budgets and timelines. For “Priscilla,” she had only 30 days to shoot a story that takes her heroine from Germany to Graceland, with detours in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Palm