NEW YORK • There are no fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, supposedly a craving of the singer. Instead, Elvis Presley: The Searcher, a two-part documentary that begins today on HBO, junks the tabloid trivia to showcase an artist and musician who was both spectacularly gifted and unconscionably misdirected.

Guided by his own ideas and instincts, Presley transformed 20th-century culture in the 1950s. But afterwards, treated by his manager as a commercial workhorse, he spent years making trivial movies and performing as a nostalgia act.