Aussie director Michael Gracey knows a little something about rising above expectations. When The Greatest Showman debuted in 2017, it was to sniffy reviews and a modest opening box office weekend – now it’s one of the most enduring musicals of the last decade. Even with that in mind, though, Better Man seemed like a gamble – a biopic of Robbie Williams? In which he plays himself, but in the form of a CGI chimp? A mad folly, surely. But no – any doubts you might have had, you can stow them now. Dazzlingly energetic, earnestly emotional and raw, and possessing some of the year’s wildest VFX, Better Man is a riot.
Covering around 30 years of Williams’s life from childhood to early fame to dangerous excess and redemption, Better Man does have a pretty conventional biopic structure and is at its least exciting whenever its playing these familiar beats. Thankfully, though, it has a consistent ace up its sleeve – the chimp. Mo-capped by Jonno Davies and voiced by Williams himself, it’s a bizarre idea that is instantly intuitive in practice, as wild and expressive as we want our rockstars to be and brought to life by excellent work from both Davies and Williams.
VFX-wise, it’s also flawless – ape Robbie never feels less real than all the normal people around him – and Gracey is able to use the inherent weirdness of the conceit to actually let us into the mind of Williams in a way that would be impossible for a more conventional biopic. Dreamscapes meld with reality, people and places get mixed up in Williams’s coke and booze-addled brain, and there’s a magnificently mad and literal ‘confronting your inner demons’ scene that justifies the entire conceit ten times over on its own.
It’s a bold gamble that really gave me a new appreciation for Williams, happy to sign the rights to his life away to a film with such a risky central premise. It’s also – chimp or no chimp – an admirably unflattering portrayal. Some of the drinks/drugs/cheating stuff feels, inevitably, really played out after decades of musician biopics, but what is less common is how willing Williams is to let the script from Gracey and co-writers Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole delve into his specific psychological hang-ups. He’s always, always doing whatever he’s doing in a tragic and desperate attempt to earn the nastily conditional love of his dad Peter (Steve Pemberton), an emotional keystone that just gets more affecting as the film goes on.
Of course, there’s also some music to talk about. Between the conventional music biopic approach to the songs and the Rocketman full-on musical approach, Gracey certainly leans more into Rocketman, tracks from Williams and Take That exploding into full song-and-dance numbers that keep the story ticking along without the need for hackneyed montages. Though ‘Let Me Entertain You’ is, naturally, a showstopper, it’s ‘Angels’ that really anchors everything, easily the film’s most richly sentimental moment and earning every bit of that sappiness.
Even outside of the whole ape thing, there’s been some chatter about whether or not Williams’s story has yet earned the whole biopic treatment (for plenty of American audiences, this might well be their first exposure to him) but, as someone who is only really casually aware of him as an artist, Better Man still hit home for me. Gracey and Williams might not be innovating much in terms of music biopic structure here, but their razzle dazzle, all-spectacle approach is the kind of big, share-it-with-an-audience fun that this genre is so often lacking. As he frequently states in his voiceover throughout the film, the thing that Williams most fundamentally wants to *be* is an entertainer – let him entertain you.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 