‘Better Man’ Review: Robbie Williams Goes Bananas in a “Take That” to Biopic Convention

Michael Gracey’s Better Man was sparked by a conversation with Robbie Williams in which the singer reportedly told the Greatest Showman filmmaker that he often views himself as a dancing monkey. The film presents the British pop bad boy as an anthropomorphized CG primate, who looks as if he walked out of one of the new Planet of the Apes movies. Walking a dizzying line between the stupid and the profound, this exuberant, positively unique biopic is as hard to resist as it is to believe that it got made in the first place.

Beginning with his youth in Staffordshire in the center of England, Better Man traces Williams’s career trajectory from his early days in youth theater, to his time as one-fifth of the boy band Take That, to his eventual emergence as a solo artist. Along the way, he grapples with the burden of fame, music mogul Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman), a romance with fellow recording artist Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), his relationship with his long-absent father (Steve Pemberton), and his use of drugs and alcohol. He’s also an ape.

Robbie is played via mo-cap and voiced by Jonno Davies (with the exception of the beginning childhood scenes), while Williams himself does all the singing. Gracey’s film feels so in sync with the artist’s incorrigibly cheeky persona that it plays like something beamed straight from its subject’s id, and remains enlightening even when the central conceit doesn’t totally work.

Throughout, Robbie’s ape-ness is played arrow straight; it’s never noticed or commented upon by himself or the characters around him, but it sets him apart visually in a way that resonates thematically. He may be a monkey, but he also has one on his back—a desperate, toxic need to be seen as something greater than human by others triggered by his father’s disinterest.

There are moments when it’s easy to wonder whether Gracey and co-screenwriters Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson should have drawn even a little attention to Robbie’s simian being, though the conceit does force us to see the hoary old tropes that the biopic is built upon with fresh eyes. The material may be the usual rise-fall-rise business, but in conjuring the emotions that it does toward a very sexy but still ape-like ape, it forces the viewer to confront the fact that we so often do see celebrities as zoo animals to be gawked at rather than the flesh and blood humans that they are. Whether this was the intended effect or a happy accident is up to the beholder.

But entertainment is the name of the game and there’s something deliciously ludicrous about watching an ape-ified version of William blow rails and bed models, while the inventive musical passages break the film out of its lather-rinse-repeat biopic mode. Gracey favors the free-flowing, reality-twisting flavor of storytelling more common to Hollywood musicals, crafting a tactilely tuneful world where working-class neighborhoods glow with the glint of unseen mirror balls and shoppers in Picadilly Circus leap into relentlessly choreographed dance.

As prototypical as the plot and dramatic beats can often feel, every one of these rousing musical interludes offers something wild and unexpected—from Robbie facing off (sword in paw) on a battlefield against his past selves, to his meeting and first dance with All Saints member and fiancée-to-be Nicole Appleton, where their painful future choice to seek an abortion plays out presciently between gauzy spins and dips. There’s a rich dissonance in seeing these emotional highs and crushing lows enacted by an expressive, mo-cap simulacrum of one of our closest genetic cousins, but, like everything else in Better Man, these passages are as excessively entertaining and emotionally forthright as the chaotic celebrity whose life they’re drawing from.

After all the ups, downs, and deliriously surreal musical vignettes, Better Man is left wanting for a final grace note that might make its bananas visual metaphor for deficient personhood fly through the rafters. The film’s schmaltzy, goo-eyed closing practically cries out for a moment (even half a beat) in which Ape-Robbie becomes Robbie-Robbie, marking his journey from an ego-driven dancing monkey desperate to be seen and loved to the “better man” of the title as complete. But then again, maybe he’s just not quite there yet.