| Well, one thing is certain, you have never seen a biopic that looks like this. Using a CGI monkey in place of pop star Robbie Williams is a creative and inventive way to turn a traditional biopic into a surreal and thoroughly entertaining musical extravaganza. And you’ll never see it again. It’s a fantastic gimmick that will work exactly once and congratulations to director Michael Gracey and executive producer Robbie Williams for pulling it off. | | 2024
Directed by: Michael Gracey
Screenplay by: Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, Michael Gracey
Starring: Robbie Williams, Steve Pemberton
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So much of Better Man follows the very typical story for a biopic, especially for a music star, but it never looks that way, and only feels that way at the end. From his childhood with an aloof/absent father but a very loving grandmother, to his sudden rise to fame with British boy band Take That, to his nonstop struggles with cocaine, alcohol and his addiction to fame, to his tumultuous marriage to British girl band pop star Nicole, and then finally his attempts to reconcile all of the above in a middle-aged retrospection when he can finally appreciate that he’s achieved the fame he always wanted.
“Why a monkey?” You would not be the first to ask. Partly it’s because Robbie himself has always said that he feels like a “demented monkey” while he’s performing on stage, probably mostly referring to his Take That days. It’s also a way of representing a costume to depict a character that so many artists inhabit even when they look like themselves, they don’t feel like themselves. A lot of this movie reminded me of the Elton John biopic Rocketman. Elton John always wore elaborate costumes on stage and often did in the movie as well; this movie is similar to that. Even though Robbie Williams didn’t necessarily wear costumes, he was being a character. This monkey is that character.
The monkey is also just plain entertaining. From a sad monkey child curled up in his grandmother’s lap being comforted, to a curly-haired monkey teenager telling a high school guidance counselor to frame his signature since he’s going to be famous one day, to a leather jacket-wearing monkey dancing in gay clubs. These are hilarious images that never get old, and unsurprisingly the monkey is very good at portraying the emotions of the highs and lows of fame.
Additional monkeys appear whenever he is on stage and experiencing imposter syndrome, usually fuelled by cocaine and more cocaine, he starts seeing earlier versions of his monkey self in the audience disapproving. This culminates into one of his big performances when he has to go into the crowd and start sword fighting all of the monkeys. If it’s not obvious, this is a very surreal biopic. A lot of very impressive imagery and editing to depict otherwise staid biopic scenes. For instance, take an impending car crash scene, with the monkey driving at high speed, everything is bathed in red light and then suddenly he drives into the water but is trapped under the ice with everybody standing on top of the ice keeping him down. This occurs at the dramatic exit from Take That after multiple cocaine caused screw-ups, but instead of that being his lowest point, he found a way to keep taking more drugs feeling like he was forced to stay under the influence by his need for fame and acceptance. Scenes like that also remind me of the surrealness of Spencer.
Robbie Williams is more famous and well-known in Britain than he is in North America; if you know him well than this movie might be too much on the weird side, but I actually didn’t know him or his music all that well and found this to be a thoroughly entertaining life story with musical numbers at exactly the right moments. When he first made it big with Take That and then when he met and fell in love with Nicole Appleton are the two most memorable musical numbers for me.
This is a movie that I loved right up until the end. But the ending feels maudlin with a disconnect between the honest Robbie Williams that narrated the movie and then Robbie Williams suddenly playing the character that the British audience grew up with.
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