Better Man ★★★★

Released: 26^th December 2024

Director: Michael Gracey

Starring: Robbie Williams (narration & singing), Jonno Davies (acting & motion capture), Steve Pemberton, Alison Steadman, Damon Herriman, Raechelle Banno

Let’s address the, err, monkey in the room: yes, it’s a gimmick.  You could tell the story of Better Man in the way that it ultimately plays out without having Robbie Williams represented as a CGI monkey played by Jonno Davies (with Williams himself doing retrospective narration and all the singing).  As bizarre as the concept sounds, it is not commented on in the film itself and director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) doesn’t play into the potential absurdity of a monkey snorting enough cocaine to keep Tony Montana in business for a year single-handedly.

The monkey is, by definition, a gimmick designed for three interlocking meta-textual reasons.  The first?  To intrigue people who normally wouldn’t give a damn about a Robbie Williams biopic.  A Robbie biopic may be Black Panther to wine mums and queers in their 30s/40s (guilty as charged), but you also have to get the non-converted in and a WTF gimmick like replacing the star with a CGI monkey grabs attention.  The second is that it frees up Gracey and co. from the usual biopic straitjacket of needing to cast somebody who looks, sounds, and physically acts like the star, often with a distractingly technical and fundamentally soulless mimic that nonetheless wins awards *coughcoughRamiMalekcough*.  Instead, behind the Wētā-assisted mo-cap, Davies gets to give a performance that’s all soul: the cocktail of nervous theatre kid energy, deep-seated abandonment issues, narcissistic showmanship, and an addict’s destructive self-absorption which made up Britain’s biggest pop star of the late-90s/early-2000s.

The third and most important reason for the monkey is that it functions as a gauntlet thrown down to the viewer.  Whilst adhering to the standard ‘rise-fall-redemption via montage and climactic performance’ beats of damn-near every music biopic ever made, even after Walk Hard mercilessly roasted them to within an inch of their life, Better Man is not afraid to get fanciful in its presentation of the ten-year-stretch from Robbie’s successful Take That audition to his record-breaking Knebworth gigs as a solo artist.  Whilst never at risk of being labelled anything other than a crowd-pleaser, Gracey’s film also takes more cross-genre and dramatic risks than your I Wanna Dance with Somebodys and Back to Blacks which, as a result, more faithfully capture the spirit of its subject than most recent music biopics.

It’s a jukebox musical akin to the Elton John’s Rocketman, for one thing. This is where Gracey’s prior experience helming Greatest Showman becomes most apparent, and they are some bloody good musical numbers at that.  Unlike the rightly forgotten Take That jukebox musical, Greatest Days, Robbie’s songs take to the West End-esque rearranging shockingly well. “Rock DJ” becomes the centrepiece for a gigantic faux-one-take number down Oxford Street symbolising Take That’s dizzying rise.  “Angels” leans into its mainstay status as one of the UK’s most popular funeral songs for a crosscut between a moment of devastating personal loss and the popstar job grind’s inability to let Robbie process said.  “She’s the One” begins as a one-on-one dance number consciously calling back to the Zendaya/Zac Efron duet in Showman, only to then juxtapose that thrill of first love between Robbie and All Saints member Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) with flashes of the music industry’s suffocating cruelty which would drive a wedge between them later.  And if I told you what “Let Me Entertain You” soundtracks, you simply would not believe me; it’s the biggest swing in a movie not lacking for them.  These numbers are fittingly audacious, directed with style and energy, enough to cause bursts of spontaneous applause at my industry screening.

Yet, Better Man is less Bohemian Rhapsody and more BoJack Horseman.  A comparison made not because both works treat their anthropomorphic leads getting handjobs from barely-adult fans as unworthy of comment, and because both are more interested in and unsympathetic about the ways that fame screws with the heads of those caught in its whirlwind.  Those who’ve watched Robbie’s excellent and revealing self-titled 2023 Netflix documentary series will already be aware.  This is a man who can get uncomfortably candid about his many, many failings over the years, and that self-reflective spirit makes its way into Better Man.  Gracey and co-writers Oliver Cole & Simon Gleeson’s script pins much of Robbie’s dysfunction on the early abandonment by his wannabe-cabaret father (Steve Pemberton), a specific working-class Midlands fear of amounting to nothing in life and being trapped mentally at age 16 in an industry and cultural climate where “depression” was a dirty word.  His crippling imposter syndrome becomes very effectively personified like a horror movie spirit, self-loathing affirmations dancing across the surround speakers as multiple versions of himself stare daggers through crowds like It Follows has gate-crashed the set.

But Better Man’s also very up-front about the fact that Robbie is, as admitted in his opening monologue and the narration going forward, more than a bit of “a fucking twat.”  An often spiteful, over-confident, self-destructive bellend preternaturally drawn to sticking his foot in it, pissing away every last penny of sympathy he could possibly accrue, and lashing out venomously when called on his bullshit.  Much like BoJack, Robbie is someone easy to empathise with, hard to like, and sometimes harder to watch as he makes one bad decision after another, trying to use both his untreated depression and his too-big-to-fail fame as excuses for his actions but not an impetus to get better.  A man who even when he’s right, like when he dresses down his father for only being there for “Robbie” and never “Robert,” can’t help but come off like kind of an asshole in doing so.

For a genre which, by and large, exists primarily as brand-management – even more so nowadays as the subjects, estates, and venture capitalists who own the back catalogue rights of musicians in question get their fingers even deeper into the filmmaking process – it is a surprisingly messy portrait.  Not to say the binge isn’t entertaining to watch, since Robbie has the kind of gigantic quote-ready character which could singlehandedly shift millions of tabloids back in the day, and Gracey directs this thing like he’s on a binge of his own; the “Land of 1,000 Dances” montage is a masterclass in curdling a fun time into something sinister.  But it is a film very aware that its subject is a polarising figure and leans into that for both cocky fun, the last lines are literally “I’m an entertainer and if you don’t like that, go fuck yourselves,” and self-critical drama.  As early as his performance of Pirates of Penzance in a school play, Better Man makes clear the character flaws within Robbie that the addictive rush of fame will exploit and metastasize to alienating and near-fatal ends.

Paradoxically, Gracey and co. may have been too successful in their approach.  Because after two hours of picking at the scabs of Robbie’s worst qualities until only the bones remain, it’s almost like everybody has only just remembered that they need to send the crowd home happy.  The resulting ‘redemption’ phase of the standard music biopic arc, therefore, can’t help but come off as even more insincere than usual.  If you spend this long tearing down a character, one musical montage showing them fixing their shit isn’t going to cut it, no matter how much you lean into musical precedent; ditto the beats involving his father. To be fair, Better Man is already starting to feel a bit exhausting by the two-hour mark (right as it hits “Let Me Entertain You”), so I’m not sure an additional reel of film would help things per se. Yet that doesn’t change the fact that the ending is a slight whiff, preventing the film from fully reaching true greatness.

Despite just missing out on being the best music biopic in years (non-KNEECAP division), and putting my innate Robbie Williams bias aside, it’s really hard not to commend Better Man.  Gracey’s film, whilst still adhering to familiar beats, is one unafraid to go for gigantic swings at every possible opportunity.  Whether that be a musical number set to an attempted car crash-suicide, a depiction of self-loathing depression that’s more unsettling than a lot of ‘elevated’ horror covering the same topic, a willingness to let its subject be a complete tosser, or even just making Robbie a monkey for the heck of it.  Yeah, the monkey may ultimately be a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick indicative of filmmakers willing to just go for it.  After the dire slate of films which have released in 2024, we need more of that kind of energy even when it comes to something as seemingly staid as a Robbie Williams biopic.