‘Better Man’ Makes a Monkey Out of Robbie Williams. No, Seriously
Robbie Williams needs no introduction. Unless you live in America, in which case, let’s bring everyone up to speed: Born in 1974, Stoke-on-Trent’s favorite son was initially the designated bad boy in Take That, Britain’s late ’80s answer to New Kids on the Block. He lived up to his reputation as a kid who loved a good time not wisely but too well, which eventually got him booted from the band. Williams’ subsequent solo career was stratospheric — without getting too Wikipedia-page about it, let’s just say that 1997’s Life Through a Lens and 1998’s I’ve Been Expecting You proved that he could hack it on his own. When he played a three-night stand at Knebworth in 2003, it became known as “the biggest music event in British history.” The single “Angels” was voted the best British song of the past 25 years in 2005. His music is one part ’90s Britpop, one part 21st century dance pop, and three parts early-’60s Rat Pack. He never found a big audience stateside, for reasons that are a complete unknown. But honestly, who needs the U.S. when you have the world?
Williams is a superstar who’s had more ups and downs than a fleet of elevators, which gives him a life story perfect for a multi-part docuseries. (See: Robbie Williams, now streaming on Netflix.) And his success and failures and phoenix-like rebirths, plural, means that, in the post-Bohemian Rhapsody era that we live in, he’s due a biopic. Better Man is that movie — it’s called this partially because of Williams’ 2000 song, but mostly because director Michael Gracey had already used the title The Greatest Showman in his previous film. It ticks all of the requisite boxes, from childhood trauma to early fame, tabloid infamy to total flame-out, broken records to broken windows, hit singles to healed souls. You will leave with a good sense of who this man is, and why his music matters to so many.
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Did we happen to mention he’s portrayed from start to finish as a CGI chimpanzee?
When we say that Better Man makes a monkey out of Robbie Williams, we’re not speaking metaphorically. “I want to show how I really see myself,” the singer says in an opening voiceover, and for the next two-plus hours, we will watch actors (Carter J. Murphy as Young Robbie, Jonno Davis as Adult Robbie) strut and fret across stages while rendered as a motion-captured, digitally rendered simian. Williams self-admittedly suffered from crippling low self-esteem, which he compensated for by putting up a blustery, self-regarding front; not for nothing was his 1999 compilation dubbed The Ego Has Landed. Yet he thought of himself as nothing more than a trained monkey, so that’s how his official movie biopic presents him as well. Which, in a way, fits how the movie treats his success story as if the subject is dragging himself from one station of the cross of the next. Imagine Raging Bull if Jake LaMotta was played by a photorealistically animated bull, and you’re halfway there. (It opens in limited release on December 25th, and goes wide on January 10th.)
Seriously, Better Man puts the PTSD back into “pop stardom,” and frames the entire notion of fame less as a reward for talent and artistry and more of a pathological condition made manifest. The password is “pathos”: A Sinatra sing-along with dear old dad, Peter Conway née Williams (Steve Pemberton, playing Pops in a way that makes his grotesques from The League of Gentlemen seem quaint) turns into a Freudian nightmare when the lad accidentally bumps the TV antenna. Soon, the patriarch is M.I.A. Later, Williams’ cheeky-chappy routine as a teen earns him a spot in Take That, where his faux-father figure Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman) will humiliate and undermine him at every turn. He’s finally given encouragement by producer/collaborator Guy Chambers (Tom Budge), who helps the newly free crooner find the cocktail of swagger, schmaltz, sex and Jolson-era showmanship that will define him. An entire rise to mega-stardom is represented by a blur of radio-announcer voices and coke lines. That’s how Robbie experienced it. That’s how you’re going to experience it, too.
It’s all a very by-the-books music biopic, which the sole exception of which species is singing about manufacturing miracles and angels contemplating his fate. The self-deprecating notion stops feeling like a gimmick before the first act is done, and stops adding anything to the vibe until we get to Knebworth, which turns into Planet of the Apes outtake mid-concert as Williams fights his inner monkey demons to the death. As anyone who’s seen The Greatest Showman can tell you, Gracey excels at this kind of glorious excess, and you can’t say that he doesn’t make the most of this being a musical as much as it is a pop-star psychodrama. Williams’ meet-cute with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) is turned into an elaborate Fred-and-Ginger routine set to “She’s the One,” occasionally cutting away to show her forced into getting an abortion. Once Take That signs a record deal, Robbie and his mates turn London into an MGM backlot-slash-jungle-gym as “Rock D.J.” blares over the soundtrack and what feels like the greatest music video of 1998 unfurls before your very eyes. The whole sequence is such a showstopper that you can practically hear it asking Showman‘s big extravaganza “This Is Me” to hold its beer. (That the 2002 track “Me and My Monkey” doesn’t get its own set piece is either a major missed opportunity or the closest thing we get to restraint.)
Better Man ends on a several notes, some discordant, of forgiveness regarding both father and son, which admittedly tests your tolerance for sentimentality. Watching the star finally make peace with himself is indeed a salve after the nine circles of celebrity hell we’ve traveled with him; witnessing his climactic (and IRL) duet with his dad, who’s done little to earn it per this film’s portrayal, suggests the title should have been Oedipus Rob. More than anything, the movie gives you a portrait of the artist as an open wound, with self-mythologizing masquerading as self-loathing and self-deprecation taken to uncomfortable extremes. That flop-sweat desperation that makes what’s arguably his one true anthem, “Let Me Entertain You,” sound like both crystalized pop-genius and a cry for help is practically wafting off every frame. It’s not a vehicle for converting the non-believers. Diehard fans, the Robbie-curious and those who love to eavesdrop on therapy sessions, however, will adore it.
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