Ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for (woah woah!): “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey has returned from whatever alien planet he comes from, and he’s brought another electrifyingly demented musical biopic along with him. This one’s a long-overdue corrective to the wave of fully authorized, insufferably generic rise-fall-recover stories that have turned celebrity estates into every film critic’s greatest threat.
“Better Man” tells the story of Robbie Williams, the bad boy of British pop, and it’s a story you’ve heard a thousand times before. A big-eyed kid dreams of becoming a star in order to fix the hole in his heart; he achieves more success than he ever dared to imagine; it affords him the money to make his problems so much worse at the expense of his personal relationships; and then he snaps out of it before it’s too late.
But for all of its bedrock familiarity, Gracey’s film distinguishes itself in two utterly transformative ways. The first and most important is that Robbie Williams is a wildly insecureasshole. And that’s one of the nicer things that people have called him. (His disembodied voice asks, “Who is Robbie Williams?” over the opening credits, only to answer that rhetorical question with options like “narcissistic,” “punchable,” and “just a fucking twat”). He’s also honest, vulnerable, and self-aware in a way that touches every facet of the bitingly satirical movie that follows, but at no point does “Better Man” sugarcoat the fact that Williams was hellbent on becoming famous to win the love of his cabaret-obsessed dad, Peter (Steve Pemberton), who left the family to pursue his own music career despite lacking the talent to make it (“You’re born with it or you’re a nobody,” he tells the boy). Fuck the craft; Williams just craves the spotlight. “Who cares if you love it?” he says. “What matters is if other people love you doing it.”
The other thing that sets “Better Man” apart from the rest of its ilk — and this might be too subtle for some people to notice — is that Williams is played by a computer-generated monkey for the entire film. Please feel free to read that sentence again if you need to. Imagine if “Bohemian Rhapsody” starred Caesar from “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” and you’ll have exactly the right idea of what that might look like. Indeed, Gracey relied on the same Weta FX artists who worked on those simian epics, with Jonno Davies wearing Andy Serkis’ motion-capture suit (Williams voices the part himself).
You will see a monkey bleach its hair. You will see a monkey party with Oasis. You will see a monkey do unreasonable amounts of cocaine, stick a heroin needle in between the fur of its arm, and drive headlong into opposing traffic while shouting a pop song at the top of its monkey lungs. Before the film screened at Telluride, Gracey told the audience that he was simply hoping to literalize Williams’ self-image as a performing monkey, but the movie itself offers no direct explanation, in large part because all the other characters don’t see Williams the same way he sees himself: unevolved.
Paramount may want to consider a video introduction or a title card before unleashing this thing in AMCs across the country, but the effect is plenty transfixing on its own. It never lets you forget that Williams is different, and that he’s at the mercy of his own wounded ambition; you can’t help but gawk at him like the star that he is, share in his embarrassment when he becomes the most troubled member of boy band Take That, or to appreciate his instinct that a normal life was never in the cards. By the end of the movie, you see him as human all the same, even if Gracey never dares to drop the bit.
It’s hard to overstate how dramatically Williams’ hooligan persona — and the movie’s fantastical illustration thereof — transform otherwise rote material into something fresh, though fans of “The Greatest Showman” already know about Gracey’s singular flair for exaggeration. In the first of several musical numbers set to future Williams hits, young monkey Robert belts “Feel” as he shuffles through the dour streets of Stoke-on-Trent, every shot glazed with an expressionistic hyper-reality that leads back to P.T. Barnum’s childhood. The sequence is all the more vulnerable and heartfelt because of the cheeky voiceover that surrounds it on both sides.
Later bursts of song and dance will up the stakes much higher. Gracey, along with co-writers Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson, bust out the anthemic “Rock DJ” when Take That hit it big, triggering an orgiastic flash mob through downtown London that hilariously interweaves the director’s Technicolor imagination with his subject’s “fuck you, I’m famous!” sense of humor. By the time Williams and his bandmates are pogo-sticking down Regent Street while half of Britain pops and locks behind them, “Better Man” has achieved the sort of giddy musical nirvana that only a small handful of filmmakers can bring to life. Williams’ meet-cute with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) aboard the bow of a superyacht might be even better, as a firework-lit montage set to “She’s the One” brightens their love affair into the sort of tabloid-ready spectacle the singer has always dreamed about.
Things get darker from there, of course, with the songs increasingly punctuated by visions of Williams’ insecurities (picture a sneering monkey in a red Adidas tracksuit), but Williams’ commentary finds the bright side to all but his bleakest moments, and Gracey’s artistry even brings a certain high to the scenes where the pop star bottoms out (a frightening underwater sequence suggests the director could make a great horror movie should he ever get bored of telling heartfelt stories about indefatigable dreamers). If Bob Fosse had fallen in love with CGI instead of jazz hands, this is probably the kind of movie he would’ve made.
But Gracey’s war against biopic convention isn’t the massacre its first hour might lead you to hope for, as the film’s pop psychology isn’t at all nuanced enough to sustain the full drudgery of Williams’ downward spiral. Much as a grief-stricken performance of “Angel” puffs some wind into the story’s wings, long gaps between musical numbers limit Gracey’s opportunities to mess with convention, and the age-old folly of trying to fit someone’s entire life story into 135 minutes begins to rear its ugly head.
That Williams is such a candid narrator — and even more forthright about his demons than Elton John allowed Dexter Fletcher to be in the Gracey-produced “Rocketman” — is a massive boon to the parts where he’s riding high. That advantage evens out when he’s at his lowest, though it’s interesting that drugs are less responsible for his rock bottom than the emptiness of success (and even more interesting that the film never resolves his addiction). “How can you not know who you are when there are thousands of people screaming your name?” Williams once asked his son, incapable of understanding how the world’s brightest spotlight might see right through you. But even as he prepares for “the biggest music event in British history,” Williams is still wracked by self-doubt. The singer dents easily, and not even £80 million is enough to convince a man that he is, as well.
Stick it out through Williams’ long night of the soul, however, and “Better Man” rewards your patience with an ending that makes good on its gimmick, and — to a surprisingly moving degree — also on its choice of title song. Williams finds the beneficence required to share the spotlight with the one person who needs it more than he does. It might feel like a cop-out in a less vulnerable biopic, but here it’s a beautiful testament to a man who followed a familiar path in his own way, and the perfect ending to a film that does exactly the same.
Grade: B+
“Better Man” premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. Paramount will release it in limited theaters on Christmas Day.
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